A Brief History of Global Capitalism

And now … a brief history of global capitalism.

I was inspired to offer this brief history of global capitalism by a friend who wrote to ask what I meant by “global capitalism” in my recent column. I got kind of snarky in my reply to my friend, because I have been explaining this in my columns, my books, and in interviews, for the past eight years. Seriously, I’m embarrassed by how often I have explained this, over and over, literally for years.

However, after a few minutes of stewing in my snarkiness, I extracted my head from my backside, and reminded myself that not everyone has read all those old columns, and books, and listened to those interviews, so, naturally, when they see me making reference to “global capitalism” in one of my columns, they might assume that I’m a Che Guevara-T-shirt-wearing Commie Pinko who wants to take away their freedom.

I got the impression that some of my readers might be assuming that (i.e., that I’m a freedom-hating Commie) as I was tallying up the flood of Substack unsubscriptions that followed my publication of the aforementioned recent column, and as I perused the usual outraged replies I get from readers whenever I write the word “capitalism” in one of my columns, which seems to just trigger the hell out of some people.

So, I thought I should probably clarify things.

I sat down, intending to do exactly that (i.e., write and publish a whole new column clarifying what I mean by “global capitalism”), and then I remembered this column that I published last year, which was a version of a little speech I gave in London at the Real Left conference. So, I decided to just republish the essential part of it here, rather than repeat myself, again. I have highlighted what I think are key points, and added some notes, in brackets.

Anyway, I hope this provides some clarity. As I wrote in that recent essay …

“I am well aware of many people’s objections to referring to the system that we all live under as ‘global capitalism,’ but that’s what it is. It may not be the kind of capitalism you want, but it is the kind of capitalism we have. If we cannot identify it, we cannot understand it. If we cannot understand it, we won’t be able to change it.”

If any readers have any questions, or want to present an alternate history and analysis that makes sense of the last 30-35 years, and where we are, currently, I’ll try to make a little more time than usual to respond in the replies.

From The New Normal Left, April 2023

“To understand what happened to the Left (i.e., how it became the New Normal Left), you have to understand the history of global capitalism over the last 30 years or so.

Actually, you have to go back a bit farther, back to the early 20th Century, when the Great Ideological Game was still afoot. Back then, capitalism, having overthrown the aristocracies, was on the march, transforming the world into one big marketplace. It was challenged by two opposing ideologies, fascism and communism. They fought it out. Long story short, capitalism won.

[Modern capitalism, born out of the collapse of agrarianism/feudalism in England in the Middle Ages, evolved into European mercantilism in the 16th to 18th Centuries, and further evolved into the form we know it in the Industrial Revolution. It spread across the world (i.e., “globalized”) during the 19th and 20th Centuries. Fascism and Communism were the final ideological adversaries it faced, both being attempts to halt and reverse the globalization of capitalism. They failed.]

Global capitalism (‘GloboCap’) was born.

It’s one big global-capitalist world now. It has been since the early 1990s. GloboCap has no external adversaries, so it has nothing to do but ‘clear and hold,’ i.e., wipe out pockets of internal resistance and implement ideological uniformity. Which is what it has been doing for the last 30 years, first, in the former Soviet bloc, then, in ‘The Global War on Terror,’ and finally, in our so-called ‘Western democracies,’ as we have just experienced up close and personal during the shock-and-awe phase of the rollout of the New Normal, and are continuing to experience, albeit less dramatically.

In other words, GloboCap is going totalitarian. That is what the ‘New Normal’ is. It is not your granddad’s totalitarianism [i.e., 20th-Century totalitarianism]. It is a new, global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. It displays a number of familiar features — suspension of constitutional rights, official propaganda, goon squads, censorship, ubiquitous symbols of ideological conformity, gratuitous restrictions of freedom of movement and other aspects of everyday life, hatred and persecution of official ‘Untermenschen,’ segregation, criminalization of dissent, mob violence, book burning, show trials, etc. — but there won’t be anyone goose-stepping around in jackboots shrieking about ‘the master race.’ It’s not that kind of totalitarianism.

To understand it (which it would behoove us to do), we need to understand global-capitalist ideology, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Global capitalism has no ideology … or, rather, its ideology is ‘reality.’ When you have no ideological adversaries, you don’t need an ideology. You’re basically God. ‘Reality’ is whatever you say it is, and whoever disagrees is a ‘science denier,’ or a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ or a ‘malinformationist,’ or some other type of deluded ‘extremist.’ You don’t need to argue ideology with anyone, because you have no ideological opponents.Society is divided into two fundamental groups, (a) ‘normal people,’ who accept ‘reality,’ and (b) the ‘deviants’ and ‘extremists,’ who do not. Your political and ideological opponents are pathologized, preemptively delegitimized. After all, who would argue against ‘reality’ except liars and the clinically insane?

Yes, of course, there is intramural political and ideological conflict within the confines of so-called ‘normality,’ just as there is intramural competition between global corporations, but challenging the ideological system itself is impossible, because there is no ground outside it from which to mount an attack. This is probably the hardest thing for most of us to come to terms with. There is no ideological territory outside global capitalism. There is no outside. There are no external adversaries. There are only insurgencies, and counterinsurgency ops.

The rest is intramural competition.

And here’s another thing that we need to understand about global-capitalist ideology, and it isn’t going to make my conservative readers, or my libertarian readers, or my leftist readers, happy. But it is essential to understanding the New Normal Left and the shape of the current ideological landscape. I’m going to try to keep this as simple as possible and not get lost in a bunch of post-structuralist mumbo jumbo.

Ready? OK, here we go.

Capitalism is a values-decoding machine. It decodes society of despotic values (i.e., religious values, racist values, socialist values, traditional values, any and all values that interfere with the unimpeded flows of capital. Capitalism does not distinguish). This is how capitalism (or democracy if you’re squeamish) freed us from a despotic ‘reality’ in which values emanated from the aristocracies, kings, priests, the Church, etc. Basically, it transferred the emanation and enforcement of values from despotic structures to the marketplace, where everything is essentially a commodity.

So, hurrah … capitalism freed us from despotism! I’m grateful. I’m not a big fan of despotism. The problem is, it’s just a machine. And it has no off-switch. And now it dominates the entire planet unopposed or restricted in any meaningful way. So it is doing what it is designed to do, stripping our societies of their [vestigial] despotic values, rendering everything and everyone a commodity, establishing and enforcing ideological uniformity, neutralizing pockets of internal resistance.

Anyway, the [ideological] battlefield looks like this … you’ve got GloboCap conducting its Clear-and-Hold op, and you’ve got the reactionary (‘populist’) backlash against it. And that’s it. Those are the only significant forces on the battlefield, currently.

The vast majority of that resistance is reactionary. I do not mean that in the pejorative sense. Most of the opposition to the New Normal has come from the traditional political right, from folks who are trying to preserve their values, i.e., to prevent them from being decoded by the GloboCap values-decoding machine. A lot of these folks don’t see it that way, because they do not want to face the fact that what they are resisting is global capitalism, so they call it other names like ‘crony capitalism,’ ‘corporatism,’ or ‘cultural Marxism.’ I don’t really care what they call it, except when they call it ‘communism,’ which just makes them sounds extremely silly.

The point is, these folks comprise a reactionary force that is pushing back against the advance of global-capitalism and its ideology, whether they know what they are resisting or not. Russia is another such reactionary force, at least insofar as it is attempting to defend what remains of its national sovereignty. Syria and Iran are two other examples. All of these reactionary forces are integrated within the GloboCap system and at the same time are resisting their absorption by it. The dynamics are complex. It isn’t a cartoon or a Hollywood movie with ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys.’

Anyway, the [ideological] battlefield looks like this … you’ve got GloboCap conducting its Clear-and-Hold op, and you’ve got the reactionary (‘populist’) backlash against it. And that’s it. Those are the only significant forces on the battlefield, currently.

Which brings us to the miserable state of the Left.

The Left — and I mean ‘the Left’ broadly, so liberals, and both serious and Brooklyn leftists — are in an ideological double-bind. Either they align with an increasingly totalitarian GloboCap or they align with the reactionary backlash against it.

They can’t align with the reactionaries, because a lot of them are … well, you know, somewhat bigoted, or they believe in God, or they object to drag queens rubbing themselves all over kids. Many of them own multiple firearms (i.e., the reactionaries, not the drag queens) and fly giant American flags outside their homes (or whatever flags they fly in Great Britain). Many of them voted for Donald Trump, or Brexit, or the AfD here in Germany, or the National Rally in France, or The Brothers of Italy. These are not BBC/NPR-listening people. These are not pronoun-using people. These are scary working-class people.

So the Left has aligned with GloboCap, which, after all, is still decoding all those nasty despotic values (i.e., racism, and other forms of bigotry), and is still opposing dictators and religious zealots, and spreading ‘democracy’ all across the planet. You might think I’m being facetious. I am not. Global capitalism is still doing that. Which I support, as do all liberals and leftists.

The catch is, as global capitalism continues to do that, and makes a big show of doing that, it is also going totalitarian. It is not decoding those despotic values out of the goodness of its heart. What it is doing is establishing ideological uniformity. The problem is, it has no ideology. All it knows how to do is decode values, transforming societies into markets and everything in them into valueless commodities. Which it is doing in totalitarian fashion. The Nazis referred to this process as ‘Gleichschaltung,’ the synchronization of all elements of society according to official ideology. That is what is happening, currently, globally. GloboCap has begun the transition from a ‘reality’ of competing ideologies, sovereign nation-states, cultures, and values to a new, supranational, post-ideological, eventually trans-human, globalized ‘reality,’ and the message is, ‘you are either with us or against us.’

The New Normal Left is obviously with GloboCap. New Normal Leftists will furiously deny this, as they shriek for more censorship of dissent and cheer for actual Sieg-heiling Nazis. Just as the ‘populist’ Right cannot accept the fact that what it is opposing is a form of capitalism, the New Normal Left cannot accept the fact that it is aligned with a new form of totalitarianism. It is literally inconceivable to them.”