The Great Disruption: reading Bannon after Schumpeter
[[this is still in draft, open for comments and suggestions]]
Calling Trump a fascist is incredibly seductive — and easy to mobilise a resistance around. However, it might it be more productive to understand him through Bannon’s many links to post-Schumpeterian stances and think of this in light of Stuart Hall’s ‘exceptional state’ model.
Steve Bannon, the former executive chair of Breitbart — the disruptive right-wing electronic news organisation — is currently being described as living out his own ambitions vicariously through power vested in Donald Trump as the 45th President of the USA. Given their past history — Trump fronting a Reality TV Show and Bannon a Film and Documentary producer — it’s reasonable to assume the President’s Chief of Strategy is, at a minimum, setting the story-lines for the front-man’s drama.
And what a drama it is turning out to be. We’re still less that 100 days into the presidency and so much has already transpired. In political discourse ‘Washington D.C.’ is often used as a metonym for America as a whole but in this episode of US history the hurricane-struck Kansas of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz seems more appropriate metaphor than the American capital: Not least because of the mid-west’s importance in determining the country’s fate at this conjuncture. Washington D.C. has perhaps never seemed so un-Washington like.
The original American fairy-tale, published in 1900 and considered to be allegorical commentary on the economic turmoil of the late 19th Century, commences with a powerful gale of destruction ripping across the mid-West state, literally blowing the world of Dorothy — the tales’s protagonist and symbol of the everyday American — inside out. When the storm dies down Dorothy is returned to a familiar Kansas setting but like reality in a dream, nothing is quite what it seems: the turbulence is only just beginning. As she sets out to find her way home, her encounters along the way become a metaphor for the key challenges to the American Dream and the characteristics required for its renewal: the scarecrow representing agricultural and questions over food security; the tin-man portraying an economy constructed around the steel industry and heavily reliant on oil — when there was no way of estimating either’s abundance; and the Cowardly Lion depicting American politicians with no courage to face the stagnant reality of Amercia’s position and identify new strategies to fulfil the dream. Intentional or not, its certainly fitting that Dorothy’s dog, which is taken along on this existential journey of discovery, is called Toto: the latin in toto translates directly as ‘in total’ or ‘as a whole’ and this seems entirely applicable to the Trump/Bannon project, which is intent on reconstituting America and the world as a whole.
In drawing this analogy with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz I wish to focus the reader’s attention on the hurricane nature of the Trump presidency and to the destructive totality of their mission. Theirs is not a programme of reform, but its not a programme of revolution either. They desire a fulsome perturbation: a shake up for Capitalism: Schumpeter’s ‘gale of destruction’. While it is possible to add the evil Wizard to Trump or Bannon’s extensive and growing list of characterisations, running from Lenin to Hitler and even the Devil incarnate, it is not the purpose of this essay — although it might be taken as a warning on how easy it is to deploy glib analogies. The goal for this provocation is to move away from the seductive personification of evil , especially the reliance on historical analogies with various currents in Fascism.
The main aim of this essay is to advance our understanding of this political phenomenon as a project of Capitalism — as a fight within Capitalism, a struggle between between different sectional interests represented by the global liberals and the national conservatives. While it’s useful to note that this conjuncture may be at the end-of-capitalism itself but before it has reified as its next thing, I do not think Bannonism represents a new class seeking to revolutionise (like the bourgeoisie of capitalism replacing the feudal aristocracy); the lens here focuses on the struggle within capitalism’s political economy itself, whether it is itself solving a terminal crisis or not — more on this later.
And in this sense I very much want to ascribe this project to Bannon: Trump may be an iconoclastic Tycoon but he is no ideologue in this regard. The two may be in deed eye-to-eye on all matters and may even share a Utopian vision of an unfettered manufacturing economy Making America Great Again; but it seems clear that the articulation of the political project — based on real conditions with real relations and interests at stake — to the theoretical project is principally Bannonite in origin. Bannon brings intellectual force to Trump’s ‘common sense’ (no doubt this is enticing and validating to the narcissism of the president, who may be a self-diagnosed ‘great thinker’ but has left few breadcrumbs for a trail if that’s the case.)
It’s also worth noting that Bannon had already tried to craft this project for Sarah Palin before she decided not to run for president in 2012 after a series of damaging email leaks. Bannon, who made a film about Palin in 2011, The Undefeated, called her “an existential threat to the establishment.” Bannon was eager to find a charismatic leader for the Tea Party movement who could connect with the ordinary American and deliver his whirlwind against the established order.
Before moving on to expand on the ideas and themes of Bannonism as I see them, I want to deal briefly with the issue of Trump’s presidency as a Fascist project. My only assertion in this regard is that, at this point in time, naming it without out understanding it can only leave us worse off. And leaving our analysis to historical analogies misses both the present conditions from which this process emerges — and as I will show later, this should be critical to our understanding — and may fail to identify the all important sites of struggles where we should organise to build a progressive route out of this conjuncture if this is at all possible.
This is not to deny the extremist and supremacist bent in the Bannon project. Nor is it to deny it has strong similarities with past Fascist projects or that fascists are amassing around Bannonism — and clearly within Bannon’s sight — seeking to exploit every opportunity that this conjuncture presents. It might be politically expedient to use the imperative urgency that comes from calling it Fascism but crafting an opposition is different task to mobilising a resistance. This nightmare will not end with three clicks of the heels like it does for Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. We must be smarter in our approach.
I want to leave the final word on the question of fascism to Stuart Hall, taken from his 1979 essay The Great Moving Right Show as it remain resolutely pertinent to this moment:
Finally, there is “fascism”. There is a sense in which the appearance of organized Fascism on the political stage seems to solve everything for the Left. It confirms our best-worst suspicions, awakening familiar ghosts and spectres. Fascism and economic recession together seem to render transparent those connections which most of the time are opaque, hidden and displaced. Away with all those time-wasting theoretical speculations! The Marxist guarantees are all in place after all, standing to attention. Let us take to the streets. This is not an argument against taking to the streets. Indeed, the direct interventions against the rising fortunes of the National Front […] constitute one of the few success stories of the conjuncture. But it is an argument against the satisfactions which sometimes flow from applying simplifying analytic schemes to complex events. What we have to explain is a move toward “authoritarian populism” — an exceptional form of the capitalist state — which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institution in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent. This undoubtedly represents a decisive shift in the balance of hegemony, and the National Front has played a “walkon” part in this drama. It has entailed a striking weakening of democratic forms and initiatives, but not their suspension. We may miss precisely what is specific to this exceptional form of the crisis of the capitalist state by mere name-calling.
[Authors note: The National Front were a significant force in the rise and renewal of Fascist activity and thinking in 1970’s Britain. Though small, they were instrumental in exploiting the crisis in a way that made it possible — and even desirable — for Conservative politicians to articulate their politics of economic reason to narratives of race and immigration.]
Unlocking the Crisis: Creative Destruction as the engine of history
There are many varied accounts of Bannon’s mindset and where he draws his ideas and political inspiration from. Although there is no clear ideological position — in fact, most of the articles that link him with various historical figures or movements are focused on tactics and not on strategy or ideology — there is a unifying theme that emerges from many accounts of Steve Bannon: America is in crisis and the solution is a great disruption.
In his inaugural address, written by Bannon, Trump coined the phrase “American carnage” to describe the result of a moribund economy creating a legacy of stagnant decay: the “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” of American industry. The target for his ire is an incumbent elite who have monopolised power: an “establishment protected itself” at the expense of “struggling families across our land.” Trump’s ‘America First’ project casts his new republicanism as nascent insurgents come to shake up the ancien regime: “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.”
We can detect in this core narrative Schumpeter’s idea of ‘creative destruction’. In Schumpeter’s explanation of capitalism, established companies and laborers enjoy a degree of monopoly power which can only be disrupted by nascent entrepreneurs who bring forth novelty in technology and business models that can reorganise the existing paradigm. In this battle for the domination of value, the nascent entrants seek to disrupt the vested interest by innovating new ways to expropriate value from the incumbents forcing them to either strengthen or exit the market. This concept is built on Marx’s idea of ‘annihilation’ where new value can only emerge from the destruction of old value.
Schumpeter condenses it as follows:
Capitalism […] is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. […] The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.
[…] The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. [… Capitalism requires] the perennial gale of Creative Destruction
We can see a lot of Schumpeter in the themes that Bannon has championed. It’s worth acknowledging here that Schumpeter’s rise in importance as an economic theorist really came to fore in the free-market re-orientation of Reagan era, which strongly featured new, heroic entrepreneurialism. It’s it well established that Bannon is fan of the 40th President of the USA. Bannon’s hagiographic documentary of Reagan, In the Face of Evil, is something of a love letter to the former Hollywood actor who took on the Soviet Union and destroyed Communism. For part of the time that Reagan was in the White House, Bannon’s was a Defence Department clerk at The Pentagon following his time in the US Navy. This surely shapes his thinking as it does for much of America’s right who still hold the Cowboy president in high regard.
Reagan was notoriously anti-government, and this is a central theme in the Trump administration — with current demands across the republican movement for a significant reduction in taxes and consequently to diminish both the scale and scope of the “administrative state”. In his own inauguration speech, Reagan said “Government is not a solution to our problems, government is the problem.” And one of his more enduring quotes, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help” became attached to the libertarian Tea Party movement in the republican party — a movement that Bannon has been most strongly connected to since at least 2009. Schumpeter’s essay The Crisis of the Tax State lays out the fiscal sociology that becomes a pillar of the small state movement.
Back in 2010 Bannon addressed a Tea Party rally in New York. He connects Wall Street and the Government as a part of global elite who, in light of the 2008 financial crash protected themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans. Instead of relying on the logic of the market, for Creative Destruction to sweep away the inefficient and ineffective monopolies, the ‘global elites’ rigged the system to defend their monopoly power. The Schumpetarian approach is contrasted starkly with the Keynesian interventionist model.
It’s worth reflecting for moment that while Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship and innovation is widely known today — and I will return this again a little later — his career was more defined by his application of political science than economics, spending his most fruitful years at Harvard. Creative Destruction was developed in his political analysis of the great trends in political economy in the 20th Century: Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy (CSD). While CSD expands in details how both Capitalism and Socialism work and the role that Democracy plays in both: he ultimately forecasts that Socialism would win though he predicts this reluctantly in the way a “doctor might tell a patient he is dying,” as he once wrote. The Wikipedia entry on Schumpeter’s view of the Demise of Capitalism captures this well:
Schumpeter’s most popular book in English is probably Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. While he agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism will collapse and be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter predicts a different way this will come about. While Marx predicted that capitalism would be overthrown by a violent proletarian revolution, which actually occurred in the least capitalist countries, Schumpeter believed that capitalism would gradually weaken by itself and eventually collapse. Specifically, the success of capitalism would lead to corporatism and to values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. “Intellectuals” are a social class in a position to critique societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and to stand up for the interests of other classes. Intellectuals tend to have a negative outlook of capitalism, even while relying on it for prestige, because their professions rely on antagonism toward it. The growing number of people with higher education is a great advantage of capitalism, according to Schumpeter. Yet, unemployment and a lack of fulfilling work will cause intellectual critique, discontent and protests. Parliaments will increasingly elect social democratic parties, and democratic majorities will vote for restrictions on entrepreneurship. Increasing workers’ self-management, industrial democracy and regulatory institutions would evolve non-politically into “liberal capitalism”. Thus, the intellectual and social climate needed for thriving entrepreneurship will be replaced by some form of “laborism”. This will exacerbate “creative destruction” (a borrowed phrase to denote an endogenous replacement of old ways of doing things by new ways), which will ultimately undermine and destroy the capitalist structure.
Although I suspect that Bannon’s view is not entirely sympathetic to this pessimistic ending for Capitalism, there is a strong congruence between his identification of corrupt globalist elite and Schumpeter’s malign intellectual class. Both see various components of the intellectual classes operate against free market capitalism, by defending a crony-capitalism-cum-socialism— thus maintaining their prestige and status — while at the same attacking its legitimacy. In Bannon’s most recent documentary, Generation Zero, Peter Schweizer, a writer who is affiliated to Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute, a conservative think-tank dedicated to small government and budget accountability, asserts “by the late 1990s, the left had taken over many of the institutions of power, meaning government, media, and academe.” He continues: “And it was from these places and positions of power that they were able to disrupt the system and implement a strategy that was designed to ultimately undermine the capitalist system.”
The long held claim of claim of the right of an institutional dominance by Political Correctness and/or Cultural Marxism also lends itself to this reading. Bannon, with long established relationship with Opus Dei Catholicism, is widely held to view that even the Vatican has been polluted with Cultural Marxism. PC and Cultural Marxism have long been the bête noire of Breitbart and the alt-right that has become attached to Bannon’s brand of republican conservatism.
If Bannon doesn’t necessarily share Schumpeter’s pessimistic end for Capitalism: he does probably consider this elites to have terminating capacity for Capitalism. He perhaps sees this more optimistically like his hero Reagan. Much of Reagan’s socioeconomic policies were based on the work of George Gilder, who was perhaps better cast as a post-Schumpterian. Gilder builds on Schumpeter’s work, — keeping the essential dynamic and endogenous replacement of old ways of doing things by new ways — but liberating it from its pessimistic core, by using government power and legitimacy to lever creative destruction against the challenges and threats inherent in Schumpeter’s expression of the process of change. In this sense, perhaps Bannon see’s himself more as an emergency-room medic to Schumpeter’s reluctant-physician-with-bad-news.
There are further post-Schumpterian themes to build on too. Bannon is a proponent of the historical theory of change laid out by Neil Howe and William Strauss in The Fourth Turning. The Strauss–Howe generational theory is mix of history-cum-prophecy, where they have reduced history to a series of cyclical processes lasting 80 years or so, roughly the equivalent of four human generations. The first turning — the High — is flush with optimism in which a strong consensus is developed about the future. In the second turning — the Awakening — progress delivers material benefit to most but makes some citizens complacent and they begin to focus inwards in their own individualism and self-actualisation de-stabilising the consensus. In the third turning —with the consensus finally diminished individualism takes hold and material benefits become hotly contested. While at the forth turning — the Crisis — an era of destruction commences as dis-trust of institutions leads to existential juncture for the society, leading to a collapse before it iterates once again to the first turning. Bannon’s documentary Generation Zero is about the ‘millennials’ who are expected to be at the heart of the fourth turning.
Howe has said in interviews that inter-generational turnings are very much dependent on Schumpeterian conception of endogenous change, concluding that “history suggests that Fourth Turnings are creative destruction in the public sector and the institutional sector, in political and economic institutions.” It is important to stress here that a critical distinction between the neo-classical economic, which eschews monopolies entirely, is that Schumpeter model requires cyclical moments of monopoly power.
It is also worth noting here that Schumpeter was also associated with other cyclical ideas in history having developed a body of work around long-range business cycles. This work was heavily influenced in by the Russian economic historian Kondratiev who proposed, from a Marxist perspective, that capitalist economic development occurred in waves of 60 years or so with four periods of technological innovation, adoption and value annihilation — this was described by a seasonal metaphor in which the Summer and Winter represent Boom and Depression respectively while Autumn and Spring are phase transitional periods. Kondratiev’s Winter would be equivalent to the Fourth Turning in generational theory.
Bannon has also been associated with promoting Nicolas Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. It is claimed that Bannon frequently gave this book to anyone who would take it while his aides are said to revere it like a Gospel. I would not claim Taleb to be a post-Schumpeterian: on one hand acknowledges that Schumpeter saw that “some things need to break for the system to improve”; while on the other hand he chides him for both a lack of appreciation of the role of uncertainty and also for being wedded to interventionism. Yet he also makes many post-Schumpeterian style arguments.
Among Taleb’s favoured metaphors for the cyclical Antifragile aspects in nature is the Forest fire which starts from deadwood to burn the old trees to make way for the new . We can see this very much as process of creative destruction, strengthening the Forest through its own adaptive annihilation.
He also argues that history should teach policy-makers to revere the entrepreneur as a warrior-like figure — I suspect Bannon sees himself in this mode — and this is certainly the essence of Schumpeter’s Capitalism in which the entrepreneur is cast as hero figure. One of Taleb’s catch-phrases is “skin in the game” through which he valourises entrepreneurs who takes real risks with their own futures, something Schumpeter claims is essential to the engine of growth. In bringing about disruption, this acts as stress to the system, and if it is to survive will only make it stronger or anti-fragile. Both Taleb and Bannon hold a strong criticism of Washington elites for not having any skin in the game during their handling of the 2007 financial crash and restricting this disruption, or at least bending to certain ends.
Taleb also holds in contempt those in intellectual life who pontificate on the nature of capitalist life yet live through it only by their prestigious access to its benefits: he holds special ire for the academics, policy makers and the media who he sees as having no skin in the game. Taleb is also a scourge of the ‘expert’ and he is renown for castigating them as ‘intellectual yet idiot’ — Antifragile is punctuated with these attacks and his public persona as an anti-intellectual concentrates on form of public ridicule for intellectuals and experts as he tries to undermine the security of their belief system. It is hard not to make the comparison with Schumpeter the reluctant-physician-with-bad-news who, if only by implication, see those intellectuals effective forming the cancer that kills Capitalism.
Though acknowledging Schumpeter for popularising the concept of Creative Destruction as taken from Marx, Taleb actually credits it to Nietzsche, who considered this in the context of Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy. Taleb calls his sections on Schumpeter “creative and uncreative destruction” which allows conceptually for some novelty or destruction to have negative consequences. Without both sides, you only have “half a life” according to Taleb. However, uncreative destruction is not a Talebian concept even if he is critical of Schumpeter for not introducing it, it is widely used in evolutionary economics by post-Schumpetrians.
It is useful to address ‘uncreative destruction’ at this point in the argument because while it usefully explains some phenomena, it also acts a get-out-of-jail card when creative destruction seems contradictory: with immigration, for example. In both Schumpeterian and Talebian terms (both immigrants by the way) immigration (of nascents) into a country, on the surface at least, should act as a creative force coercing the incumbents (natives) into survival/adaptive mode ultimately making local systems (of labour, culture, etc) stronger. But if the incumbents don’t adapt — or can’t — then their exit from the system is expressed as build up of grievance — this doesn’t strengthen the system but weakens it. This could be explained away through the exogenous effects of migration or through it’s uncreative modality — the grieving incumbents cannot exit the civic system even if they have exited the labour system for example. This creates justification for this to be exploited politically, as Bannon has done, while remaining committed to the notion of Creative Destruction.
It is probably useful to close this section here. I’m not holding Bannon up as a deity of coherence and nor am I supposing that Creative Destruction is his only credo. But I hope I have identified a strong core in his system of beliefs, such that we have access to them. Importantly, we should see many of these themes as present in in our general culture.
Why it matters if Bannon is one thing or another
If Bannon is a post-Schumpetarian — or at least that he adheres to the ideas of creative destruction and also recognises the symptoms for Schumpeter’s predictions for the end of capitalism — it can help to advance our understanding of the the phenomenon he represents, to help us grasp the subjectivities that are at play in the alliances that are gathering around Trump in America but also coalescing around a newly energised right-wing the world over.
Many people will not have come across Schumpeter as theory, though many will have encountered his idea of Creative Destruction. Since the late 1970s the simple form of his idea has been so widespread that even if you were not aware of it, the policy machine has been reliant on it in many ways. But most recently — in our age of the start-up and the valourisation of the entrepreneur — it has become hugely widespread.
It is surely a coincidence that Donald Trump was the front-man for The Apprentice: a reality TV game show in which budding entrepreneurs competed to demonstrate their mastery of value creation through innovation and the practical application of Creative Destruction. Yet it is also formative that this exposition of creative destruction is ideologically present in the established culture. The entrepreneur is lionised in our culture: from the primary school, where it is now taught to to the youngest children, to The Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice.
Even the sphere of ‘social good’, the main form of institutional response to poverty and inequality is the social entrepreneur — the new hero of change armed with the weapons of social innovation, using the risk-taking, value creation approach — seeking novel ways of scale-able disruption. ‘Disrupting poverty’ is so widespread an activity it is now almost a cliche of voluntary welfarism.
The culture of disruption is so prevailing it is even on the left. In Britain, the socialist leaders of the Labour Party have constructed an alternative economic policy that not only valourises entrepreneurs but even seeks to construct an ‘entrepreneurial state.’ Creative destruction is a not an optional extra in our culture: it’s a given.
In this light Bannon may not be a revolutionary nor a reactionary. He is stepping out of a cultural system that many of us not only accommodate, but actively participate in. He may be taking it to a different level— critically aware of Schumpeter’s predicted denouement and attempting to save it — but this phenomena is an emergence from a society that we all surely recognise and he is deploying the tools of that are central to the Modern constitution of that society and its culture.
This can explain the authortarian bent he has too. If he see this crisis as existential, the coercive model — [more GMRS to come here…]
On the terrain of the conjunctural and in the glare of the organic
I set out on this enterprise of provocation because I saw many people trying to deliver critiques of Trump and Bannon: Of the hundreds — if not thousands — I encountered I saw no one mentioned the obvious linkages to the culture of Creative Destruction as constituted in the current narrative of disruption. Were we missing it because it was right beneath out nose?
When I went to seek it out, I found direct examples from Bannon including a revealing Breitbart Radio interview with Newt Gingrich where they both riff on Creative Destruction. There is also some discourse on it from supporters and a lot of background material for the post-Schumpeterian justification of the small-state libertarianism but nothing from the left. I’m still puzzled by this absence.
Maybe Bannon is an extreme disruptor and we are just moderates? Then that is a surely site of conflict we should explore? What does our moderation mean and what the are the extent we will tolerate? Maybe we’re not opposed to disruption per se, only to travel in certain directions? Maybe we’re all Schumpeterians now?
There are many avenues to explore here. This may not even give rise to any challenge to Bannonism, but it may make us reflect on what we seek build as an alternative? I hope it does.
When I first ‘got’ Bannon — it was the transcript of a speech he gave to a Catholic anti-poverty conference including a follow up Q&A session— I realised that: a) he was a aware of a crisis; b) he saw his efforts and the emerging global movement that he was part as trying to resolve that crisis in favour of capitalism; c) that he saw others actors in the crisis as bad and/or evil incumbents; d) that he saw the resolution as a disruption. I was instantly reminded of Gramsci’s quote:
A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts (since no social formation will ever admit that it has been superceded) form the terrain of the ‘conjunctural’, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise. These forces seek to demonstrate that the necessary and sufficient conditions already exist to make possible, and hence imperative, the accomplishment of certain historical tasks (imperative, because any falling short before an historical duty increases the necessary disorder, and prepares more serious catastrophes). (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, International Publishers, New York, 1992: 178)
And from the quote I was also reminded of Hall’s Great Moving Right Show essay in part because he uses the quote but also because he reminds us that “Gramsci insisted that we get the ‘organic’ and ‘conjunctural’ aspects of the crisis into a proper relationship.”
It seemed to me at that moment — and still — that this is a crisis is not unlike the crisis which Thatcherism and Reaganism emerged from. In fact, it feels very much like unfinished business. So, it seems important to both try to situate this crisis in the here and now— the conjunctural elements around Trump’s Election/Brexit/the new Right/etc — but also to contextualize it against that earlier conjuncture to evaluate its depth but also its formative nature. This is ‘exceptional’ crisis, and the key actors are doing ‘exceptional’ things to resolve it.
Importantly, what is in sharper relief than was apparent in the 1980s that this is battle for the heart of capitalism, for a change of direction. We can put to one side that those allied around Trump/Bannon believe they are battling ‘the left’ as Schweizer put it — it barely matters if this is a deceit or a delusion. This is a crisis where the two main protagonists are different types of capitalists, with different needs for the organisation of the mode of production.
The original supposition of this article was Bannonism or Trumpism — how ever we should name it — is something different than Fascism, it shares something with it, yes, but, as of yet, it doesn’t appear to take on the “exceptional form of the state” that was apparent in both Hall and Poulanz or others. I attempted to set out here that it is in some way a product of our times and is not specifically a reaction to them per se. It look likes our times are in a deep and organic crisis for Capitalism — or something after capitalism, we should not rule this out — which has lasted at least since the 2007/8 crash if not an emergence from the crisis from the 70s/80s. The strategy that is being deployed in trying resolve this crisis — by Capitalist interests— is neo-Schumpeterian in nature, firstly focusing on Creative Destruction and the axis of innovation/disruption and secondly being concerned with the organic crisis that Schumpeter predicted for the demise of Capitalism. So ultimately, this provocation raises the question what should a left response be if the original supposition is correct?
A number of questions for the left that must be considered carefully. It may matter in which order they’re asked too, but for the moment I present them without ordinal concern: Is the main political task at this conjuncture to defend one capitalism against the other? In picking sides are we able to win new concessions? Are we better of seeking to exploit their crisis for our own ends? What are those ends? Can momentum be built in which an organised left can enter the conjunctural terrain and destabilise the balance of forces? Or does the left remain too weak to participate except through resistance? If so, is this another crisis that will pass by — another season of the Great Moving Right Show? Does it highlight anything further about an ongoing need for renewal? What are the alliances that should be considered? Is there important theoretical work to be done? Is this crisis just your run of the mill crisis like others previous to it? Is it a continuation of an organic crisis that first emerged in the 70s/80s? If so should this change the strategy? Etc.
