(Roughly) Daily

From Álvaro García Linera, a provocative essay on the times in which we live, which he begins with a quote from the World Bank (March, 2023):

“Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading.”

Linera continues…

For 35 years, from 1980 to 2005, the moral and labour order of much of the world was governed by a set of basic principles. These principles encouraged an imagined and inevitable destiny for the course of societies. They underpinned the personal and family efforts with which individuals justified their daily activities, their sacrifices and their everyday strategies.

The free market was perceived as a “natural” mechanism for allocating resources, offering individuals a “niche of opportunity” for entrepreneurial ventures. Globalisation was seen as the path to a universalised humanity, where the prosperity and welfare of the world’s affluent would eventually percolate down to everyone, commensurate with their efforts. The minimalist state would liberate social energy and reduce taxation. The goal of zero fiscal deficit would shape the nation into a homestead austere in collective rights but auspicious in rewarding the competitive and successful. These guiding emblems served as perceived imperative destinies. Most governments, businesses, journalists, opinion “leaders”, social leaders, renowned academics, and families aligned their expectations of a bright future and their feasible possibilities for development and modernity with these principles.

It was the prevailing spirit of a world with a sense of direction. Societies anticipated an inevitable future. Families, a certainty of epochal proportions. Individuals saw an outlook, a predictive horizon under which they would shape their daily strategies. The distance to these goals did not matter, nor was it demoralising to face numerous failures or disruptions along the way or to consider the uneven odds of success. These were powerful ideas, part of a shared imagination, equipped with the tacit certainty of common sense, which made it possible to organise the fragmented patchwork of daily life towards a destiny of success and greatness.

“That’s just the way the world is, and that’s how one must be in the world”, nearly everyone said. The arrow of time was hurtling towards this optimistic future, and no one, unless utterly out of step with the times or the world, could claim otherwise.

The first early signs of the decay of this global order emerged from the peripheries of the capitalist world at the start of the 21st century. Latin America began experimenting with alternatives to the prevailing economic and political systems, implementing hybrid policies that combined sovereignty, expanded rights and free trade, followed by the global financial crisis of 2008. Then, there was a shift towards a semi-protectionist form of neoliberalism, exemplified by Donald Trump in the United States and Brexit in the United Kingdom. This shift led to the “geoeconomic fragmentation” of the global order into regional blocs that traded based on political alliances and geographical closeness. [1] Overall, we are witnessing the slow and melancholic disintegration of the old free market order and the nascent rise of various alternative models, none of which has secured a definitive foothold yet. This scenario gives rise to a chaotic world, characterised by fleeting trajectories, still unable to discern a new order that, if established, could endure for another 40 to 50 years…

[Linera review the last 150 years, and the economic and political phases that have characterized them…]

We are witnessing the decline of the global accumulation model that has dominated for the past 40 years. The world will not revert to its former state, where globalism was the shared and enthusiastic language across societies. However, this shift does not mean the disappearance of neoliberalism, nor does it indicate that a new model is ready to take its place. Instead, we observe a landscape of global confusion characterised by contradictory economic directions. While globalism is still advocated in certain areas, fervent protectionism prevails in others.

We are witnessing the decline of the global accumulation model that has dominated for the past 40 years. The world will not revert to its former state, where globalism was the shared and enthusiastic language across societies. However, this shift does not mean the disappearance of neoliberalism, nor does it indicate that a new model is ready to take its place. Instead, we observe a landscape of global confusion characterised by contradictory economic directions. While globalism is still advocated in certain areas, fervent protectionism prevails in others.

It is as though the meaning of history has dissipated, overtaken by the immediacy of a world that appears devoid of destiny or promise. We have been left with only the burden of an endless and aimless present.

It is a peculiar foyer of historical times where everyone knows their origins, yet no one has the slightest collective vision of the future. We are in a liminal epoch, a threshold separating an exhausted neoliberal era—with no active people’s consensus, persisting solely by inertia, kind of like a zombie—from an anticipated historical period that paradoxically fails to materialise and remains unannounced, undefined and unexpected. This enigmatic historical moment seems non-existent, plunging the world into the solitude of an unfathomable abyss without name or boundary…

[Linera characterizes this liminal moment…]

In the coming decade, social stupor and unease must swiftly give way to a period of cognitive readiness—an imperative shift to discard old beliefs and embrace new ones where solutions to prevailing anxieties and needs are viable. This will mark the moment for the crystallisation of a new belief system, one that will restore direction to historical time and rejuvenate the passage of social time with clear objectives. A century ago, Durkheim discussed such periods as “moments of creative effervescence”—times when new ideals emerge to guide humanity. This transition basically involves the formation of a new model of legitimisation and domination. This model must either be based on or adapted to a new paradigm of economic accumulation.

The cognitive opening of society follows no predetermined path and has no set timeline. It is not merely a rhetorical flourish or a simple result of top-down negotiations. Instead, it represents a volatile moment in which new modes of future sociality are forged. This opening can veer in conservative directions, such as post-fascist variants, or it may take reformist or revolutionary paths. The political struggle inherent to this moment—determined by how political forces respond to society’s cognitive openness—will define the nature of the new cycle of legitimation and accumulation.

In fact, we are witnessing the early symptoms of this impending battle across various parts of the world, albeit in local, peripheral, partial and ephemeral forms. Economically, this is seen in the experimentation with hybrid models that blend free trade and protectionism, especially in critical areas such as energy transition, telecommunications, microprocessors and modern industrialism. We also see the regional contraction of strategic product value chains through friend-shoring, aimed at reducing dependency on countries like China, or a revival of archaic neoliberal practices, now draped in authoritarianism.

Despite time-related limitations and their current inability to establish enduring and influential hegemonies, these initiatives serve as laboratories for exploring potential future actions. Alongside other emerging options that may overcome these initial constraints, these possible lines of action will contend on a global scale for the monopoly of new, powerful ideas. They aim to foster a new global common sense, one that captivates societal hopes and imaginations for the decades ahead, thereby initiating a new cycle of global accumulation and domination…

Eminently worth reading in full: “The age of uncertainty- liminal time,” in Metapolis. (TotH to Dewayne Hendricks)

* Antonio Gramsci

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As we fumble with the future, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to a man whose thinking both contributed to our current fix and may offer help in finding a way out: John Stuart Mill; he was born on this date in 1806. A philosopher, political economist, politician, and civil servant, Mill was the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and thinking about political economy.

Mill reputedly learned Greek at the age of three, Latin and arithmetic at eight, and logic at twelve. He studied with Jeremy Bentham, and followed Bentham’s Utilitarian lead, though Mill both extended and deviated from his mentor’s thinking. He was a member of the Liberal Party and author of the early feminist work The Subjection of Women (and was the second member of Parliament to call for women’s suffrage after Henry Hunt in 1832).

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has called him “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century.”

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
– John Stuart Mill

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