Quinn Slobodian

Quinn Slobobian is a Canadian who teaches who teaches and writes about the history of ideas at a University in the USA. This book traces the ideas of libertarian theorists and anarcho-capitalists - mostly people with elite educations - who have influenced capitalists to invest, and influenced governments to allow low-cost labour to be assembled at scale to build things that wealthy individuals can buy or rent.
It is about globalism, economics and politics. It assembles evidence of how the ideas of this movement are being used to create inequality, oppress the working class and the poor, and spread the ideology of state capitalism favoured by several Asian states in the 21st century.… (mehr)

When I was growing up, there were 120 countries in the world. Today there are about 200, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. Ever smaller, ever more specialized (tribal, ethnic, racial) countries is where the world is heading. It is fragmenting, not unifying. When I was in my twenties, Carl Sagan asked “Who speaks for planet Earth?” This question is ever farther away from being answerable today.

Libertarians want everyone in the USA to fend for themselves, with no overarching protection or shield. That philosophy is being extended to the whole planet. The rich want to get rid of countries and replace them with tiny, personalized local jurisdictions, ruled only by capitalism and a corporate or superrich owner. In this scenario, there would be not 200 nations globally, but hundreds of thousands. They would be united only by free trade laws. After that, anything goes for each zone. That is the essence of Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian.

The fraying edges of globalism, Slobodian says, are the special economic zones. They range from Hong Kong to Disney World. They have their own laws, their own economies, their own police, and greatly reduced taxation, if any at all. He says there are at least 5400 of them so far. Countries all over the world set them up for the superrich to build facilities, and hire the locals (China has half of them. Think Shenzhen, Guangzhou…). They see it as a shortcut to success for their people.

But of course, it is not a shortcut for the workers. They (mostly) can’t reside permanently in these zones; they are only for the very rich. Workers tend to live in barbwired encampments – dormitories with sparse furnishings and no services. They work six days a week for pathetic wages and no benefits. They are killed in large numbers by unsafe working and living conditions (as in building for Qatar’s World Cup extravaganza, where thousands perished). And they have no recourse. They are single-use disposables. They commit suicide at rates that forced Apple’s top vendor Foxconn to install gigantic nets around its dormitories to catch the jumpers, just like slave ships used to do. Last year, P&O Ferries simply fired everyone rather than negotiate with employees to cut wages in half. There was nothing anyone could do about it; they were registered under multiple offshore flags where employers could do what they wished. Workers are simply cheap resources that can be turned on and off at will in these zones. How they survive is of no concern to the owners.

The superrich have always been against the democracies that have given them their success. Slobodian cites Milton Friedman claiming “a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy.” There seem to be endless capitalists who willingly state that capitalism is far more important to them than democracy. As long as they have the freedom to move themselves and their money around the world, nothing else matters.

They argue that nations spend in the wrong places, lose money to corruption and are slowed down by demands for social safety nets and safety standards that require taxation and reduce profits. Sovereign corporate republics – sovcorps – would not have these issues. No, the money just goes straight to the rich, who will pay no taxes on it. That, in their view, is ideal. Corporate crime, greed and corruption however, are not up for discussion.

Life in a sovcorp would be purely contractual. The government would provide nothing at all. Water, electricity, streets, police, fire, ambulance - absolutely everything would be by private contract (which is why only the very rich can afford to live there). Crime would be a case of breach of contract, not involving district attorneys, sheriffs or state prisons. Expulsion would be the sentence of choice. Just get rid of them and keep the fantasy going.

Like any gated community, everything would be prescribed, from the color of the house to the color of the drapes to the height of the grass on the mandatorily empty front lawn. On the other hand, there would be total freedom to consume, total freedom to pollute, and total freedom to be a self-sovereign entity. The rest of the country, or the world, is of no interest. As clean water became more scarce, the price would simply rise, without complaint from the superrich. There would be no poor, no welfare, no food banks, no Medicaid, no food inspectors, no prescription drug testing, no seatbelts and especially, no elections.

The chapters of the book profile different sovcorps, with varying degrees of corporate control. There are chapters on Hong Kong, Singapore, Lichtenstein and various South African zones that all attract big business. But none of them are pure. The Emirates are all dictatorships, financed by oil. Hong Kong is in constant turmoil as China attempts to remove democracy from it. Singapore is big government writ large, where rules right down to the length of men’s hair and the banning of chewing gum are the way of life. South African zones were all about rationalizing apartheid. Lichtenstein was a matter of a German royal family exercising its many prerogatives to set up a banking empire where there were more companies than citizens. Dubai is renowned for its “sex trafficking, child jockeys and the exploited and often unpaid workforce,” Slobodian says. They are far from utopias, but they are poster children for anarcho-capitalists; they are proof of concept.

Somalia, which lost its central government to total anarchy, became an instant object of desire, the “perfect” opportunity to set up sovcorps everywhere. The country was always tribal, which would bestow structure instantly to any zone the rich would set up. What could possibly go wrong? Somalia is a basket case of constant warring. Those tribes and families are headed by warlords jockeying for power. Only the total disrespect for lives shines through in the sovcorp model. The main industry in Somalia appears to be ship piracy and extortion.

In some ways, this is nothing new. The horrors of company towns, where the company is the law, issues company scrip that can only be used at the overpriced company store and where no freedom of speech was tolerated, are extremely well documented. I have reviewed many of the books that Slobodian cites in his thousand-plus end notes.

As well as the free trade zones, maquiladoras, special enterprise zones, sovcorps and fantasy island cities, Slobodian profiles a handful of individuals. Every era seems to have had its zealot (anarcho-capitalist fantasists, he calls them), flying the world to find space and a funder for this utopia-in-waiting. As each one failed, he would simply move on to the next one. They are not very well known names, but in a saner world, they wouldn’t have gotten even that far. In this world, they seem to find enthusiastic funders, (mainly ultra-conservative Americans) looking to make another fortune. These agents achieve their goals just by showing up and mingling at conferences of the superrich. It is yet a further threat to life on earth.

Having examined various attempts at anarcho-capitalism on land, Slobodian takes to cyberspace. There, the exact same mentality, from the exact same players (notably Peter Thiel), is driving democracy-free communities online. The parallels are just too obvious. Rich white would-be rulers launch online communities, with their rules, totally under their control. Users can lease land or build buildings, all of which remain the property of the corporation, and all manner of supplies, services and accessories are available, for good old cash. Users can stay as long as they are useful idiots, spending lots of real money, but have to leave when they stop making the owners richer or get in the way.

Slobodian is terrific at presenting all the variations of anarcho-capitalist zones, their contexts and their histories. Often it even appears they might be viable; he is that fair. But there is also another whole area he did not examine – the courts that support it all. The Roberts court, aped by other federal courts, has been strictly anti-labor, pro-corporate, in favor of rights restrictions and against women’s rights for 20 years now. These comprise exactly the framework of corporate and superrich requirements for tax-free zones. British courts have been no better. As long as the courts have their back, inequality will thrive.

Politically and historically, this model is a gigantic retrograde step. The world was a collection of walled cities until 400 years ago. Getting in was hard. Being kept out was dangerous. Membership had its privileges, and the rest be damned. Imagine needing a visa to go from New York to Boston, and being banned for overstaying. This would be a world where nothing would ever be achieved globally. Where university degrees might not be recognized from city to city. Where contracts replace constitutions, where governments provide no services at all, and do not monitor products or services for safety or fraud. Air, land and water would be privatized. Urinetown would not just be Broadway musical. You would have to pay to pee. The poor would simply be expelled to forage in the woods. Life expectancy would be measured separately for rich and for poor.

For Quinn Slobodian, the Palestinian “refugee camp” in Gaza makes an accurate look at what life in one of these zones would be like. He says the surveillance, the armed force and the technology newly developed and deployed for purpose “puts the Berlin Wall’s death strip to shame.”

Welcome to the future. And another battle to fight.

David Wineberg… (mehr)

A well-chosen topic, but not the greatest approach to it, I think. Slobodian's subtitle hints at the interesting part of his book: neoliberalism as an approach to the economy and government that was well-suited for states leaving behind their empires. That would have been a great journal article, but here it's buried underneath a lot of information that is more easily available in the many other books about neoliberalism (Dardot & Laval's 'New Way of the World', for instance) and chapters that are kind of relevant but mostly just interesting on their own (the stuff on how the global economy was visualized or rendered into data). There's nothing wrong with the book, but it's just too much of a mess and tries to do too many things. Basically, it's absurdly over-rated. This isn't a slur on Slobodian, or the project. But the book is disappointing. Definitely listen to the interview Slobodian did with the podcast, 'The Dig,' and if that's not enough, maybe flip through a library copy of this one.… (mehr)