![]() ![]() This is not just speculation about a future agenda. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.If Crack-Up Capitalism charts a project that created enclaves of market radicalism to leverage wider systemic change, it raises an important set of questions: what would a politics of the zone look like pursued from the left? What would it mean to build enclaves of democracy-against-capitalism? Is it possible to carve out and sustain collective space free from capitalist governance? Would such a politics be capable of prefiguring and driving deeper economic and social transformation or would it remain episodic and incidental to the wider operation of society? From coercive restrictions on organised labour to tax arbitrage that undermines state capacity to the insulation of corporate power from regulation by public authority, these anti-democratic enclaves prefigured the policies that define much of the contemporary global economy. But what went on in the zone did not remain in the zone. As Slobodian shows, the effect of “crack-up capitalism” was to create zones where normal practices of taxation were suspended, investors dictated their own rules, and organised labour was crushed, often violently. In this vision the zone is an accessory and escape hatch to a world of capitalism without democracy.Ī political movement focused on punching holes in the nation-state and undermining the legal and territorial integrity of the global economy has historically been the province of the libertarian right. But, however different the form, zonal politics share the same political content: the effort to establish spaces in the global economy that operate by self-defined laws and regulations, with democratic oversight suspended and market rule unimpeded. These enclaves are diverse in geography and nature, from colonial-era Hong Kong and apartheid South Africa, to free ports and special economic zones, to cryptocurrencies and visions of start-up “network states”. It is a story of how a quixotic alliance of libertarian ideologues, anti-democratic entrepreneurs and Thatcherite acolytes have carved out states of exception to insulate capitalism from the constraints of the state and its rules. In his latest work, Crack-Up Capitalism, his focus is on the politics of the zone. In Globalists (2018) he examined how a coalition of politicians, academics and lawyers sought to legally encase and protect capital from democratic reordering. How to make capitalism safe from democracy? The intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian has shown how the architects of neoliberal governance have strived to answer that question since the 19th century.
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