(Roughly) Daily

… for many, this phrase from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci sums up the current crisis of world politics and world power. Adam Tooze unpacks the oddity– and potential danger– of these lines becoming one of the soundbites of the early 21st-century…

… I want to put this conceptualization of our current crisis in question. Gramsci’s notion of interregnum may have served him to illuminate his immediate context. But, it transmits to our era a philosophy of history that actually obscures how we got from his moment of writing to our present day. It thus stands in the way of thinking hard about the challenges and opportunities of our current moment.

The currency of Gramsci’s lines today today should give us pause. After all, if we take Antonio Gramsci seriously as a historical thinker, as we absolutely must, we should also acknowledge the huge gulf that separates him from the present. He was a Communist who paid with his life for his commitment to the cause of world revolution. His lines on interregnum, now the stock in trade of after dinner speeches and think tank meetings, were composed in November 1930 in a fascist jail. Gramsci was thirty-nine. He would die at 46, his fragile health irrevocably broken by harsh imprisonment.

With morbid symptoms Gramsci may have been referring to fascism. Alternatively, he may have been criticizing the turn to the ultraleft of the Italian Communist party under pressure from Moscow. His medical language evokes Lenin’s famous denunciation of left communism as an “infantile disorder”.

Wondering about the popularity of Gramsci’s lines today, I’ve come to think that it may have something to do with the way in which they combine drama – crisis, birth, death, interregnum – with an undertone of reassurance. If this is true, it is a deep historic irony. Gramsci derived his fortitude and belief from his Marxist understanding of world history. Today his words serve very different purposes.

First of all, Gramsci’s quote implies a definite direction of historical travel. We know what is old. We know what is new. We may currently be in crisis, but it is only a matter of time before “the new” will eventually be delivered.

A transition from old to new might imply significant change, which could open us up to thinking about radically different futures. That might be good news. But it might also be disturbing. Once again reassurance is provided by Gramsci’s definition of the crisis as interregnum. The present is an inter-regnum, because it a period between two orders. It may be messy now, but a new era is on the way.

This kind of historical thinking is not confined to Gramsci. It is nicely illustrated, for example, in this conventional chronology of modern economic history.

Once cast in terms of the sequence of regnum-interregnum-regnum our current disorder becomes merely a passing moment. Given this sequence, who could doubt that a new white bar lies ahead of us. In this graphic, the grey phase of interregnum that began in 2008 already has a right-hand demarcation, even if no date is, as yet, attached to the endpoint.

A further point of certainty amidst Gramsci’s interregnum, is that we can confidently distinguish what is morbid from what is healthy. This again implies a superior vantage point, something that one might think would be in jeopardy in a true moment of crisis.

The obvious question is: what is the basis for Gramsci’s judgement? This troubling question is especially pressing if Gramsci was, in fact, applying the label morbid not to fascism but to those he disagreed with in the ranks of the international communist movement. Was this a medico-technical diagnosis? Or, was his judgement, like Lenin’s, a political act, an act of polemic, stigmatizing disagreement? In which case the naturalized conception of crisis is, in fact, disguising a political clash.

Finally, and most fundamentally, Gramsci’s diagnosis locates the current crisis within history imagined as a natural cycle of life, of birth and death…

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… Models of this kind gesture to the confusion and terror of interregnum, all the while reducing that phase of disorder to something temporary, recurring and predictable. The model gestures to historical development – the upward step of phase after phase – but actually reduces radical change to repetition. After one hegemony what we look forward to, is simply another.

This line of thinking is not just simplistic. In the current moment it is dangerously so. To the drama of America’s evidently waning hegemony it adds the intensity of the follow-on question: who comes next? This question – far from necessary – is framed by the assumption of historical repetition – hegemon-interregnum-hegemony. In the current moment there can only be one possible answer: CCP-led China. That in turns eggs the flailing American elite on to a more intense rearguard action. But why assume that in the 21st century there will be a successor to America’s 20th century power?

Any serious examination of the foundations of modern power actually suggests that this kind of cyclical or sequential view of history is misplaced.

Take GDP as a proxy for power resources and think about the kind of intellectual gymnastics which are necessary to turn history as depicted by GDP below into [a cyclical] sequence…

As for the long-run continuity, global GDP prior to the 19th century is so low that it can not be sensibly depicted on the same graph extending into the 20th century. This is also true for economic heft and destructive power. Of course, there were highly destructive wars, in the 17th century for instance, but their violence unfolded according to a very different logic from that in the 20th century.

And as for the pattern of change, what we see is not a neat sequence of substitutions in which one hegemon displaces another, but rather something more akin to “piling on”. This is history not as repetition, but in Mark Blyth’s wonderful phrase as a “one-way trip into the unknown”…

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… I see the construction of global hegemony in the 20th century not as a repetition of something familiar, but as itself a venture into the unknown. To put it simply, I see global hegemony as a 20th-century problem…

Of course, the distinctive 20th-century visions of global power had precursors. They had preconditions. Something had first to constitute our modern conception of globality. This happened through the global system of power, communication, transport and commerce created by the British Empire in the 19th century. This constituted for the first time what Michael Geyer and Charles Bright called the “global condition”. All too often this encourages thinking in terms of an Anglo-American sequence. But again this underestimates the power of accumulation and overlay. Compared to US power in its mid 20th-century pomp, the British empire was a thin mesh of networks. The British empire maintained its grip with extremely limited resources in large part as a result of the weakness of its rivals…

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… But by 1916 it was clear that only the United States had the power to manage the new configuration of global forces. The weird architecture of global mobilization in the first phase of WWI could not be sustained without at least the approval of the government of the USA. This is the story of my book, Deluge.

The economy, as measured by novel statistics of national income, would be America’s trump card. But that in itself is not an obvious fact. It was an effect of particular circumstances. 1916 is a pivotal moment because with the inconclusive battles of materiel at Verdun and the Somme, following the “hunger winter” of 1915/1916, it became clear that purely military operations were at an impasse and this meant that war production and home front stability would take on a new and central role in determining the course of the war. War became a new kind of totalizing war. It was also an election year in the USA, arguably the first formal democratic event (as opposed to a revolution) to matter on a global scale. Certainly, it was the first US election that was watched with baited breath by political classes around the world.

It was out of the historically specific, financial and economic urgencies of World War I, that a new American-centered network of power emerged. This was something new, something architected and built to meet the urgency of the moment. There was no womb of hegemonic logic from which the US power was born to replace a dying British global order. It was not the inevitable sequence of monetary logic that ground through its inevitable development to make the dollar replace the pound sterling. It was war and war finance. The dollar in the 20th century would play a role quite different from sterling under the 19th century gold standard. Furthermore, America’s global power did not substitute for British power. It overlayed Britain’s own efforts, first in World War I, then in the interwar period and finally during World War II, to master the new hegemonic problem. In crucial areas, notably the oil fields of the Middle East, it was not until the late 1960s that the US finally took over…

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… America’s age of hegemony was not an answer to an interregnum. It truly was new. It was thus not the latest iteration of some familiar form of power. It did not replace the British empire. The British empire was reinventing itself too in response to the new challenges of the early 20th century. It was overtaken by the US and nested itself under the wings of that power. It was not something born. It was built.

And if that is true for the early 20th century the question of how 21st century global power will be organized should be considered no less open. Certainly, our problem right now is not that the old is simply dying. Things are far from that simple. In certain crucial respects “the old” is hanging around and indeed seeking to mobilize new strength. At the same time the principal challenger may be “new” in the sense of unfamiliar. But the CCP-regime draws inspiration from a first successful century of ascent, evokes ancient Chinese history. And what its underlying drivers are, is a matter of contentious debate.

What is old and what is new, what morbid and what vigorous, what the underlying generative logic of history actually is, these are all questions that are at this moment up for debate. We are, therefore, experiencing a crisis of confidence and a period of uncertainty, that is far deeper than talk of an interregnum à la Gramsci implies. To be clear this does not necessarily mean more lethal or more tragic than the epoch that cut short Gramsci’s life. Our normality, however catastrophic, may be manageable. The environmental clock is ticking, but the majority of us are no longer poor. We live longer. Today, Gramsci’s life could probably have been saved. There are gigantic technological resources that democratic and progressive crisis-management could draw on. What we must let go of, is the false mantle of confidence and historical clarity that evoking the concepts of an earlier epoch entails. Abandoning talk of an interregnum may rob us of certainty. But rather than a council of despair this is simply a demand of realism. What that promises, is the chance to trade historic phantoms for new projects and the exploration of the actual possibilities of the present…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Built not Born – against “interregnum”-talk,” from @adam_tooze.

And what might we build? For a reminder that our options are perhaps broader than we might think: “The Gap at the End of the World,” from Cynthia Cruz in @LAReviewofBooks.

* Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

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As we keep our eyes up, we might recall that it was on this date last year that a new kind of cultural phenomenon burst onto the scene, surrounding the simultaneous theatrical release of two films, Warner Bros. Pictures’ Barbie and Universal Pictures’ Oppenheimer— Barbenheimer, as it came to be called.

The simultaneous release was an instance of counterprogramming. As the release date approached, discussion from rivalry to the prospect of watching the films as a double feature. Cast members of both responded by encouraging audiences to watch the films on the same day. Celebrity participants included actor Tom Cruise, who purchased tickets to watch both while his latest film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, was still playing in theaters.

In the event, both Barbie and Oppenheimer received critical acclaim and exceeded box-office expectations.  Their joint opening weekend was the fourth-largest at the American box office, and both rank among the highest-grossing films of 2023. The phenomenon also extended to the year’s awards season, in which both films emerged as leading contenders, earning a combined 21 nominations at the 96th Academy Awards. Both films were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, which Oppenheimer won.

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