The scale of fiscal policy was certainly dramatic. Between Q2 2020 and Q1 2021 Congress approved the most dramatic series of fiscal programs in peacetime history.

Though they did better than expected in the mid-terms in 2022, in November 2024 the Democrats lost to Trump. Inflation was widely cited as a reason for voter dissatisfaction. Does this vindicate the critics and suggest the need for a fundamental revision of policy?

In a recent column, Martin Sandbu at the FT warns that the Democrats are in danger of overcorrecting policy. I am delighted to say, that on this point I strongly agree with Martin.

To start with, what are we trying to explain? The Democrats lost, but by the standards of incumbents worldwide their defeat was relatively marginal.

When we consider the extraordinary weakness of Biden as a candidate, one might reverse the question and ask whether the remarkable track record of economic policy over the last four year, in fact, helps to explain why the Democrats did so much better than virtually every other governing party.

Secondly, we have to ask how the inflation variable and above all inflation expectations function in American political economy today. Even from a casual inspection of readily available data, it is clear that economic sentiment and partisanship in contemporary America are not independent variables. The effort to explain voting behavior by reference to feelings about the economy is naive because reported sentiment about the economy is clearly tied to partisanship.

This doesn’t mean that we should dismiss the real socio-economic problems of chunks of the electorate. We just shouldn’t treat those issues and the salience and meaning voters give them as separate from broader process of political self-fashioning and orientation. Economic sentiment is not an independent cause. If someone declares that worries about the cost of living swung them to vote for Trump in 2024, it would be naive to imagine that if Biden’s economic policy had delivered a marginally lower inflation rate that voter would have swapped back to the Biden camp.

In the United States today, political partisanship and worldview, individual socio-economic experience and macroeconomics are profoundly entangled. This effect is so powerful that, as a recent paper by Carola Binder, Rupal Kamdar and Jane M. Ryngaert shows, partisanship shapes the macroeconomic environment itself.

We document that, during the COVID-19 era, the inflation expectations of Democrats remained strongly anchored, while those of Republicans did not. Republicans' expectations not only rose well above the inflation target, but also became more sensitive to a variety of shocks, including CPI releases and energy prices. … Counterfactual exercises imply that, had all expectations become as unanchored as those of Republicans, average inflation would have been two to three percentage points higher for much of the pandemic period, ceteris paribus. …. Before 2020, members of the President's party have inflation expectations that are about 0.92 percentage points lower than those of independents and members of the opposition party have expectations about 0.11 percentage points higher, so the gap between members of opposing parties is about 1.0 percentage point. Since 2020, those effects have more than doubled in magnitude, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats is 2.5 percentage points. Males, college-educated respondents, and homeowners all have systematically lower expectations than their survey counterparts, but the partisan gap in in ation expectations is the largest in magnitude.

After 2020, whereas Republican inflation expectations tracked the current inflation rate, Democratic one-year inflation expectation remained closely aligned with professional forecasters in expecting inflation to be transitory. These differences mirror differences in attitudes to expertise more generally. The Republican faithful are disproportionately anti-vax and suspicious of all kinds of expertise. Unsurprisingly, with Donald Trump now reelected, Republicans now have a far more sanguine inflation outlook.

One variable that weighed heavily on Republican inflation-expectations is the price of oil. The correlation between short-run inflation expectations and the gas and oil price is roughly twice as large for Republicans as it is for Democrats.

The point here is not to pillory Republicans for the way in which they form their economic outlook. No doubt, their outlook forms part of a settled outlook, which makes it seem sensible for them to express the views that they do.

The barb is directed at technocratic policy advocates, especially those in the Democratic camp, who discuss inflation expectations and unemployment-inflation trade offs as though they were non political variables to be optimized by policy maker and on that basis make highly conservative recommendations to the Democratic camp. In America today, government driven by fear of “de-anchoring” inflation expectations is government driven by fear of Republican and “independent” voters whose expectations are far more likely to de-anchor. It is a populist variant of the unspoken politics of “confidence”.

A straight forward and powerful defense of Democratic economic policy in 2021 - and really the Congressional Democrats should take credit for the stimulus programs of 2020 too - was delivered on January 15 by out-going Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. this is backed up by a substantial Treasury report. I will quote at length:

First, consider comparisons to other advanced economies. Virtually all advanced economies experienced a significant spike in inflation. But in the United States, inflation fell earlier than in other G7 economies.^[14] At the same time, America enjoyed strong growth. Real GDP now exceeds pre-pandemic levels in all G7 economies. But it grew by more in the United States: by 11.5 percent from the end of 2019 to the third quarter of 2024, followed by 7.3 percent in Canada and 5.6 percent in Italy.^[15] This is largely attributable to robust U.S. productivity growth, which far outstripped productivity gains in other G7 economies.^[16]

At the same time, America quickly achieved and has subsequently maintained a uniquely strong labor market with notable real wage gains. In the period from Q4 of 2019 to Q2 of 2024, the United Kingdom is the only other G7 country that also experienced substantial real wage growth. Real wages grew modestly in Canada, remained essentially unchanged in France, and declined in Germany, Japan, and Italy.^[17] The Economist magazine’s mid-October issue perhaps sums it up best, designating the U.S. economy the “envy of the world.”

Comparing this recovery to past ones further underscores the strength of our expansion. While the COVID recession entailed the largest spike in unemployment in living memory, the U.S. unemployment rate declined to its pre-pandemic level in just two years. This contrasts significantly with longer than four years in the 1990, 2001, and 2008 recessions.^[18] The historic 37 percent increase in real median household wealth from 2019 to 2022 also stands in marked contrast to the 2007 to 2010 period, when real median household wealth instead fell by 39 percent.^[19] And business investment fell less and recovered faster as a share of GDP than in prior recessions, with businesses investing an estimated $625 billion more during this expansion than if investment had followed historical patterns.^[20] This historically impressive investment performance reflects domestic and foreign investors’ confidence in the stability and productivity of our economy.

Comparisons to economic forecasts from various points during the past four years also demonstrate the strength of the U.S. recovery. In the fourth quarter of 2021, real GDP exceeded the Blue Chip consensus forecast from October 2020 by more than four percent.^[21] The economy then continued performing better than expected. Even in October of 2022, Blue Chip forecasters expected that a recession was more likely than not in 2023, with many prominent forecasters asserting that a recession was a near certainty.^[22] As we all know, that recession did not come to pass. In fact, the U.S. economy, remarkably, is expected to be more than 10 percent larger by the end of 2024 than the IMF forecasted in October 2019, before the onset of the pandemic.^[23]

Alongside these three comparisons, we should also consider a counterfactual: how inflation and labor market outcomes would have differed under alternative policy choices. With respect to inflation, it’s true that the prices of many everyday goods soared in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, placing a major strain on many American households. However, as the supply disruptions that drove much of this inflation abated and labor market disruptions subsided, the pace of inflation cooled dramatically. With respect to the labor market, support from the American Rescue Plan substantially offset the income gaps confronting roughly 10 million people^[24] who had become unemployed or had left the labor force by the end of 2020. That both averted significant hardship and supported demand, which allowed Americans to get back to work quickly. The rapid decline in unemployment enabled the United States to avoid labor market scarring—the erosion of skills and reduced employability that can result from long periods of unemployment—and thus avoid an associated reduction in future potential output.

Now, consider the likely consequences of an alternative fiscal response, one solely aimed at preventing the post-pandemic surge in prices without considering the consequences for unemployment. To prevent that inflation surge, fiscal policy would have had to be much tighter. Indeed, a contractionary fiscal policy would likely have been needed to offset the inflationary impact of the pandemic-induced contraction in supply. Such a policy would have withheld critical aid from households and businesses and would likely have led to far lower output and employment. That could have meant millions more people out of work, households without the income to meet their financial obligations, and lackluster consumer spending.

An important “what-if” exercise would ask: how much more unemployment would have resulted from a fiscal contraction sufficient to keep inflation at the Fed’s 2 percent target? The answer is “a lot,” although the exact magnitude depends importantly on some key parameter values, particularly the Phillips curve slope, which measures the sensitivity of inflation to a demand-induced contraction in output. Most estimates of the Phillips curve find it to be quite flat. That implies that the employment and output cost of suppressing inflation would have been very substantial. But researchers debate whether such an estimate applied during the pandemic, which was an unusual period characterized by shortages of production capacity in critical sectors and some significant labor market bottlenecks that restrained supply. Some researchers argue for a higher estimate of the Phillips curve slope, and consequently a lower employment and output cost. Such differences notwithstanding, it is widely accepted that some increase in unemployment would have been required to offset the pandemic-induced inflation. Estimates from representative models find that the unemployment rate would have had to rise to 10 to 14 percent to keep inflation at 2 percent throughout 2021 and 2022. That would have meant an additional 9 to 15 million people out of work.^[25]

Since the counterfactual is doing quite a lot of the work here, let us dig into the Treasury report that outlines the detail of their argument. A footnote in their report explains to that to make the calculations that result in the horrifying scenario of keeping inflation at 2 percent at the price of 10-14 percent unemployment:

_{“we assume a linear Phillips Curve. First, we calculate the extent to which monthly annualized core PCE inflation exceeded the target of 2 percent for every month in 2021 and 2022. We then divide those excess inflation estimates by estimates of the Phillips Curve slope (which is the percentage point change in the inflation rate per 1 percentage point change in the unemployment rate) to determine how much higher unemployment would have had to be in each month to bring inflation down to target. We use the following “reduced-form” estimates of the Phillips Curve slope: -0.57 from Ball & Mazumder (2015) and ‑0.34 in Hazell et al. (2022).”}

The Treasury economist team know this is back of the envelope stuff, so they add:

Other models suggest that when labor markets are very tight, it may be possible to reduce inflation with smaller rises in unemployment.^[26] Nevertheless, the sheer magnitude of the results associated with the simple Phillips Curve model demonstrates the implausibility of pursuing policies that would have fully prevented excess inflation in the face of the supply shocks seen during the pandemic era.

But the bigger question is whether inflation was in fact amenable to fiscal policy at all. As the Treasury report highlights:

Some studies show that even if tighter policy been pursued, the peak in inflation would have been only slightly lower. One analysis from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that with tighter policy, unemployment would have risen to 7 percent at the end of 2022 and remained well above 6 percent through the end of 2023, rather than below the 4 percent we experienced. However, the study found that temporary supply constraints contributed about three fourths of the increase in median CPI inflation during this period and would have occurred anyway. This means that, even with higher unemployment rates, peak core PCE inflation would have been only one percentage point less than the 5.6 percent that occurred.^[27],[28] Another analysis found that earlier monetary tightening would have led to unemployment rates over 6 percent going into 2023, with similarly modest reductions in inflation—only about 1 percentage point less than peak for core PCE inflation.^[29]

As they conclude by saying:

None of these estimates are unassailable, but they highlight the magnitude of the risks faced by policymakers around the world.

It was a judgement call.

In 2021, the United States was only slowly exiting a truly profound national crisis triggered by COVID, BLM and the final year of the Trump administration. The Democrats had unexpectedly gained a slim majority in Congress to go with the White House. Given the mounting social crisis and the memories of the slow recovery from 2009, they took a calculated risk to prioritize recovery, employment and growth. They were handsomely vindicated. In so doing they proved the doubters wrong. As the Treasury points out:

… because of the tradeoff between inflation and employment, many forecasters thought it impossible to bring down inflation at all without the cost of higher unemployment. As of the end of 2022, Blue Chip forecasters’ probability of a recession the following year was over 62 percent. And, yet, as of the latest data in November 2024, the three-month PCE inflation rate is down to 2.3 percent, the labor market remains historically strong, with the December unemployment rate at 4.1 percent, and forecasters’ assessment of recession risk was cut in half.^[30] So far, it appears that a “soft landing” has been achieved, albeit with ongoing risks.

The second Democratic defeat at the hands of Donald Trump is shattering. It may well change the face of America and the world beyond. For areas like climate policy it is an unmitigated disaster. There are, no doubt, many lessons to be learned from the failings Biden administration. The idea that bold fiscal policy is dangerous should not be one of them.

***

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David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexican, 1896–1974), “El Señor del Veneno”, 1918.

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If we look at the balance between the two sides, such speculation seems implausible. Whereas, Ukraine fights to keep the lights on, Russia is still a prosperous exporter of oil and gas. All the more telling is the drum beat of questions being asked by influential Western voices.

“Here’s hoping” is how Gideon Rachman on twitter reacted to a piece by Finland’s Foreign Minister in the Economist which declared that “Time is not on Russia’s side.”

Martin Sandbu of the FT doubled down with a column declaring:

Russia’s war economy is a house of cards. The financial underpinnings look increasingly fragile. President Vladimir Putin’s conceit has been that he can fund this war without financial instability or significant material sacrifices, but this is an illusion … The most important thing Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to impress on Ukraine’s western friends is that he has time on his side, so the only way to end the war is to accommodate his wishes. The apparent resilience of Russia’s economy, and the resulting scepticism in some corners that western sanctions have had an effect, is a central part of this information warfare. The reality is that the financial underpinnings of Russia’s war economy increasingly look like a house of cards — so much so that senior members of the governing elite are publicly expressing concern. They include Sergei Chemezov, chief executive of state defence giant Rostec, who warned that expensive credit was killing his weapons export business, and Elvira Nabiullina, head of the central bank.

Already in November 2024 Tony Barber in the FT cast doubt on Russia’s official economic data. The new evidence that inspired Sandbu’s piece came from the Substack of Craig Kennedy. Kennedy produces data showing a surge in corporate borrowing in Russia, much of which takes the form of “policy loans” at subsidized rates, which are being used as a backdoor for war-financing.

Though this helps to keep war expenditure off the government balance sheet, its impact on the Russian economy is all too real. In particular, credit-fueled war-demand explains the stubbornly high inflation rate and “crowds out” other types of borrowing and investment. At the same time, it piles up mountains of underperforming debts, which at some point will become a recipe for financial instability and bank runs.

How big is this pressure? According to official data, inflation in Russia is currently running at 8 percent. Unofficial estimate put the figure far higher than that. The fact that the central bank has seen it necessary to raise rates to 21 percent suggests that they think the problem is more serious than the official figures suggest.

The market for foreign exchange is another indicator of financial anxiety. At the end of 2024, following a new round of sanctions, the rouble suffered a bout of weakness on foreign exchange markets. And as Alexandra Prokopenko and Alexander Kolyandr at the Bell comment, “The Kremlin has few options to prop up the Russian currency”

Western sanctions alongside demand outstripping supply are weakening the ruble. In the last week of November, the Russian currency experienced a dramatic collapse, down almost 25% from summer highs. The authorities don’t have many tools to tackle this problem: half of Russia’s gold reserves are frozen by sanctions, and the rest might well be needed to fend off threats to financial stability. The National Welfare Fund contains relatively little in the way of liquid assets. Without non-residents, who have largely exited Russian currency markets, and the free movement of capital (this has been restricted since 2023) interest rates are no longer an effective tool to stabilize the currency.

As a result, they conclude: “Ruble volatility is the new normal”.

Add all these factors together - depreciating currency, high inflation, even higher interest rates, mounting bad debts - and you can easily paint the picture of a war economy under stress, plagued by excess demands and the risk of financial instability.

The narrative of a house of cards waiting to fall does not require evidence of specific weakness ahead of time. Almost by definition, financial crises tend to explode as if “out of nowhere”. If we knew where they would strike, we would take preventive action ahead of time. As Kennedy comments:

Unlike the slow-burn risk of inflation, credit event risk—such as corporate and bank bailouts—is seismic in nature: it has the potential to materialize suddenly, unpredictably and with significant disruptive force, especially if it becomes contagious. … Moscow greater concern is likely Russia’s deteriorating credit environment could unleash events that dispel the widespread misperception—artfully promoted by Moscow—that Russia’s war finances are sustainable and face no significant risks. That misperception provides Moscow with valuable leverage in prospective negotiations. … Moscow now faces a dilemma: the longer it puts off a ceasefire, the greater the risk that credit events uncontrollably arise and weaken Moscow’s negotiating leverage.

But how serious is this risk really? It is certainly unpredictable. But by the same token, if the threat is of a sudden “credit event risk”, this is something that can be contained by decisive action by the monetary authorities, as the US monetary authorities have demonstrated in recent years. The West can certainly increase the risk of something breaking and can make it more difficult for Moscow to contain the fallout. The very act of pointing to Russia’s vulnerability of declaring its war economy to be a house of cards is performative. It helps to undermine confidence. Both Kennedy and Sandbu are frank about their political intent in this regard. Their aim is to call Russia’s bluff, to urge sanctions and to strengthen Ukraine’s bargaining position.

This is all very well, but it should not be confused with realistic analysis of Russia’s economic and financial situation. To judge the long run sustainability of the war effort the real issue is not the risk of financial crises, but the question of the underlying strength, or lack of it, of the Russian economy. This is the question that has been asked again and again since 2022. It remains frustratingly hard to pin down.

It is now commonly agreed that Russia reacted to the shock of war and sanctions with a Keynesian war economy. The possibility was raised by this newsletter as early as March 3 2022. Russia’s war Keynesianism has proven particularly effective, because of the chronic underutilization of the Russian economy in the 2010s. An export-focused policy centered on domestic austerity, had starved the Russian domestic economy of effective demand. In 2022 everything changed. The surge in domestic demand triggered by the war unleashed rapid growth in 2023 and 2024.

This has been fueled by Russian state spending in which defense plays an ever larger role. At 8 percent the defense budget remains surprisingly small relative to GDP. If Russia was really maintaining its current level of military activity on such a small share of GDP it would, frankly, be rather disconcerting. Rather than a damning revelation, it is to a degree “reassuring” to learn from Kennedy and Sandbu that actual military spending is well in excess of the modest official figures. It stands to reason that a substantial part of additional spending must be being financed off balance sheet. That isn’t surprising. It is exactly what one would expect in any well-managed wartime mobilization. The financial burden of the war is being spread across public, private and quasi-public balance sheets.

The impact on the Russian economy is to drive, lop-sided growth in manufacturing. As one report points out:

The results of these investments are striking. Russia has doubled its production of armored vehicles and increased ammunition output fivefold at certain facilities. A new sector—mass production of military drones—has emerged, while funding for civilian drone programs has been slashed tenfold. A significant portion of this budget supports Russia’s burgeoning force of contract soldiers. With the army requiring 20,000 to 30,000 new recruits monthly, the Kremlin relies heavily on financial incentives to attract men to the front. Average enlistment bonuses, supplemented by regional allowances, now stand at 1.1 million rubles ($11,000), with annual incomes ranging from 3.5 million to 5.5 million rubles ($34,000–53,000), depending on region and unit. These payouts place a heavy burden on regional budgets, with bonuses reaching as high as 2 million rubles ($19,000) in Moscow and 3 million rubles ($29,000) in the Belgorod region on the border with Ukraine. Such inflated sums reflect the shrinking pool of willing recruits, which is forcing authorities to offer additional incentives, such as debt forgiveness, university admission perks, and healthcare benefits for soldiers’ families. Direct federal spending on new recruits alone is estimated at 1.6–2.4 trillion rubles ($16–23 billion), not including additional costs for wounded soldiers and compensation for families of the deceased—figures obscured by classified statistics.

This is the fiscal arithmetic of what Vladislav Inozemtsev in 2023 dubbed Deathonomics. It places a heavy burden on public budgets. But that spending does not disappear into thin air. It flows back into the war economy and it ultimately serves to generate new flows of income for the state, in the form of taxes. According to the forecasts for 2025, tax revenues are expected to rise 73 percent.

It helps that Russia’s energy revenues from exports have been buoyant. As Bloomberg reports: “Russia’s oil proceeds to the state budget increased by almost a third last year to the highest since at least 2018, spurred by higher crude prices as the nation adapted to international sanctions.”

Source: Bloomberg

Moscow controls its own tax rate. But, clearly, Western sanctions have not been doing their most fundamental job of financially constraining the Russian war machine. This is not to say that they have no impact. But the fact that oil tax revenues (which are four times larger than gas revenues) were larger in 2024 than at any time since 2018 is a stark indication of the lack of real determination on the Western side to shut Russia out of the global energy economy.

Unsurprisingly, the drain of the military draft and the rebalancing of the Russian economy generates significant pressures in the labour market. Far from any stagflation scenario, Russia is at full employment, with an unemployment rate of 2.3 % and a need for 1.6 million additional workers. The Russian economy continues to run hot. If there is inflation, it is in large part driven by surging nominal wage growth. As one report has it: “The Kurgan region, home to Russia’s sole producer of armored personnel carriers, has seen salaries jump by 33 percent. The Volga and Ural regions, hubs for defense manufacturing, are close behind.”

Rapid wage growth offsets inflation, leaving Russian households better off. And it is not just workers who are benefiting. As a leading expert on economic sanctions points out, the remarkable fact is that Russian households in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution - presumably not highly skilled industrial workers - have seen their real incomes increase by almost two thirds since 2022.

Perhaps unsurprisingly: “Surveys indicate growing perceptions of a fairer distribution of income, with over 40 percent of respondents openly rejecting the need for personal freedoms or human rights, instead equating dignity with state-provided salaries and pensions.”

The real question is whether this war-driven growth model can be sustained and what its costs are?

Alexandra Prokopenko writing for Carnegie Politika argues that it “cannot address the chronic problems that have long plagued the Russian economy. We are witnessing an irreversible turn toward economic stagnation.” She points to the slowdown in growth in the defense industries, and the fact that:

Other sectors are faltering: extractive industries face declining production due to lower hydrocarbon export prices and OPEC+ production cuts, while agriculture has also lost momentum. Retail trade remains a rare bright spot, buoyed by consumer spending. However, surveys point to slowing business activity and rising inflation expectations among both businesses and households. … Falling global prices for coal and metals, combined with sanctions, have plunged the coal sector into real losses for the first time since 2020. This sector employs 650,000 people across thirty-one single-industry towns, where the shutdown of a single enterprise can paralyze an entire community, making its members prime candidates for government support. But other struggling industries—automotive manufacturing, non-food retail, and housing construction—are also lining up for state assistance. Resources are stretched thin as stagnant oil and gas revenues, coupled with energy sanctions, limit budgetary inflows. While tax revenues have temporarily offset falling hydrocarbon income, they are consumed by current expenditures, leaving no surplus. By November 2024, the liquid portion of the National Wealth Fund stood at just $31 billion, its lowest level since the fund’s inception in 2008. That reserve is insufficient to meet growing demand.

Interestingly Prokopenko points out that whereas manufacturing workers and welfare recipients may be doing well the same cannot be said for all constituencies.

The greatest losers in this overheated economy are Putin’s core supporters: public sector workers, including teachers, doctors, law enforcement personnel, and pensioners. Their wages and benefits are tied to official inflation rates of 9 percent, but real inflation for many households exceeds 20 percent. Meanwhile, the central bank has delayed its target of returning inflation to 4 percent, pushing it back to mid-2026 as Kremlin spending priorities crowd out monetary policy objectives.

These are immediate pressures that might conceivably impact decision-making. But as Prokopenko herself acknowledges: “A sudden collapse akin to the 1990s is unlikely: the government still has the resources to maintain a minimum level of order and control. … In Putin’s Russia, administrative costs for implementing policy decisions are remarkably low. Without public debate or opposition, the government can impose new taxes on individuals and businesses with minimal resistance. The public does not protest, and lawmakers in the State Duma vote as instructed. Major resource companies have already been subjected to extraordinary profit levies, such as Gazprom in 2022 and Transneft in 2024. Fertilizer producers, still active in global markets and largely untouched by sanctions, are likely next in line. Consensus within the government’s economic bloc is not required; Putin alone determines the course of action.”

This is not a system of government that is particularly vulnerable to the kind of crisis that Kennedy and Sandbu predict. After all, we know how effectively Putin’s power apparatus dealt with the shock of the 2008 financial crisis. The Kremlin orchestrated a ruthlessly effective stabilization effort. Faced with the far smaller financial risks of 2025, why doubt that it could repeat that tour de force.

The weaknesses that Prokopenko identifies in her analysis pertain not so much to crisis-management as long-run growth. “The structure of Russia’s market economy is steadily losing its flexibility under the weight of war and a centralized decisionmaking system that prioritizes control over dynamism. Subsidized sectors of the economy, insulated from interest rate fluctuations, are expanding rapidly. Beyond the military-industrial complex and its affiliates, preferential loans now underpin agriculture and real estate development as well. … Simultaneously, the Kremlin and the government are embracing a dirigiste approach to fiscal and monetary policy, increasingly dictating economic outcomes from above. … The proliferation of emergency measures disrupts conventional management practices. Ad hoc decisions are becoming the norm, even in areas where institutional solutions could suffice.. … ”

All this may be true. And it certainly goes against conventional institutionalist prescriptions for long-run economic growth. But this too is hardly the kind of immediate threat to Putin’s regime that would warrant describing the Russian war economy as a “house of cards”.

A more convincing analysis of Russia’s immediate situation comes from Vladislav Inozemtsev writing in the Riddle under the title of “In the kingdom of economic paradoxes”.

As 2024 comes to an end, Russia is experiencing one of the most intense bouts of economic hysteria since the first weeks of the war in Ukraine, when the collapse of ‘Putinomics’ seemed inevitable to many. After two years of growth fuelled by massive injections of money into the military-industrial complex, the creation of a well-paid army of mercenaries, significant deregulation of foreign trade and adept sanctions evasion, the economy is still facing visible challenges: accelerating inflation, declining investment and a slump in the construction sector. The government has been forced to raise taxes to balance the 2025 budget, but the most alarming symptom is the rapid increase in the Bank of Russia’s key interest rate, which recently hit a record level of 21% and is likely to climb even further by year-end. Dozens of commentators point out the stark gap between this rate and the inflation rate, arguing that such levels simply leave little room for economic growth. … criticism of the Bank of Russia now comes not only from independent and opposition-minded authors, but also from the system insiders. Consider the emotional speeches by Sergey Chemezov, the head of Rostec; the complaints of the leaders of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) demanding that the Bank of Russia should coordinate monetary policy with the government, and even warnings from the Centre for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMASF) about a potential recession. The same group of ‘pragmatic managers’ has long criticised the Central Bank’s credit policies for hampering industrial growth and the government for hoarding excessive reserves.

But how seriously should one take such protests? As Inozemtsev points out:

It is hard to believe Chemezov’s claims that the defence industry is on the brink of profitability or that the Ministry of Finance provides only modest advances for the production of armaments … , while other funds have to be borrowed. Meanwhile, the Bank of Russia has recently released a detailed study estimating the share of interest payments in production costs at 3−3.5% (this is based on 2023 data, which means that the figure may have reached 4.5% considering the rising interest rate).

That is hardly the stuff of a serious profit squeeze. Furthermore, as Inozemtsev points out, whether an interest rate of 21 percent is excessive depends on what you think the inflation rate is. If you hold the popular opinion that Russia’s official data understate inflation by a large margin, then 21 percent may actually be the right rate. If you take the official rate as gospel then there can be little doubt that such a draconian rate will do the job of bringing inflation down.

What cannot be disputed Inozemtsev agrees is that the Russian economy is under pressure from high rates and rising inflation. Housing demand has fallen. Business profits are under pressure. The growth rate is likely to fall to 1.5 percent or less. But this is a slow down rather than a crisis.

Tax collection remains robust; the most pessimistic forecasts about declining export revenues have not yet materialised; and the ‘deathonomics‘ model continues to work. Moreover, if active hostilities in Ukraine cease or freeze in the coming year, this will undoubtedly increase the resilience of the Russian economy and (albeit less significantly) reduce the level of military spending. As we noted in a report co‑authored with S. Aleksashenko and D. Nekrasov, Russia has now sufficient economic resources to sustain the current course for at least another three years, which is why I am far from catastrophising. Dimitri Nekrasov’s calculations about Brazil’s economic performance in the 2000s, alongside nearly everything we know about the Russian economic system in the same period, suggest that an economy can operate under high real interest rates for many years if expectations are positive and/or there is substantial budgetary stimulus. That said, now is undoubtedly a good time to consider measures that can be undertaken to counteract the negative trends seen in recent months. … I have recently argued that the period from autumn 2024 to summer 2025 will serve as a ‘second adjustment’ phase for the Russian economy, somewhat resembling the period of adaptation to the new realities in the spring and summer of 2022. To navigate the current stage successfully, unconventional measures and approaches will almost certainly be required—from the Bank of Russia, the government and the Ministry of Finance.

Inozemtsev goes on to argue that inflation in Russia today is “not purely monetary in nature”. The growth rate in monetary aggregates has been brought under control since 2023. “The issue lies more in rising cost pressures from government-authorised increases in utility tariffs (natural monopolies), higher taxes, the effect of the appreciation of major currencies against the rouble, rising logistics costs, and increased commissions for international transactions … ". The obvious answer is for Moscow to apply direct controls on prices and to tighten antimonopoly legislation. Will this shrink corporate profits? Might it depress private investment? Yes it will. But that “is precisely the additional demand squeeze that the Bank of Russia is already seeking through higher rates”. He also advocates for financial repression in the form of interest rate caps to curb inflows of cash deposits into the financial system. Such measures would most likely affect only the richest Russian households.

As Inozemtsev concludes:

In any scenario, however, we do not foresee inflation accelerating to above 20% year-on-year, nor do we consider the business credit burden to be incompatible with economic growth over the next one or two years. Beyond this timeframe, either the government and the Bank of Russia will be forced to intervene more actively in the current situation, or the economy will find a new equilibrium, particularly if external conditions change significantly.

In an appreciative reply to Inozemtsev in early January Yakov Feygin insists that “we can’t dismiss the seriousness of Russia’s economic impasse”. He argues that the “distributional logic of a war economy under pressure — the political economy that undergirds its winners and losers — may give the Kremlin less cushion to adjust than it had in 2022.” But as Feygin concludes: “The empirical question is just how much capacity Russia has to spare to put off these choices or introduce them slowly enough to avoid a massive political shock. This question is very hard to answer. When the war began, many had hoped that sanctions would quickly collapse the Russian economy. Instead, Russia’s economy grew as wartime spending raised incomes and supercharged Russia’s consumer. High energy prices and years of accumulating reserves meant that Russian economic officials could deftly handle the impact of higher transaction costs. Does that mean that past is prologue and Russia has hidden reserves of strength? Maybe. However, it might also mean something else about the longer course of the Russian economy: it has been operating below potential since 2014 … ”. Is that room for growth now used up? That is the central question for the coming years.

Faced with the prospects of negotiations, it may suit Western pundits to conjure up the specter of financial collapse in Russia. But, if we actually want to get a realistic assessment of Russia’s long-run power potential, images like a “House of Cards” are an indulgence. What we need to know is how Russia’s political economy is actually put together.

***

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Georges Rouault, “Hindenburg”, 1930.

Numbers spinning out of control.

As private insurance pulls out of insuring homes in the most disaster-prone American states, public last resort backstops are absorbing the risks, so far to the tune of $ 1 trillion.

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Daniel Boyd (Australian, born 1982). “Untitled (MIVPFADL)” (2021). Source: Ocula

Student debt is baaaaaaaack

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Kaputt (1944) is a kaleidoscopic vision of Axis Europe’s upper class between 1941 and 1943.

The Skin (1949) is a notorious account of Naples following its liberation by the Allies in 1943.

But Malaparte also published a third book during the war that is far less well known. The Volga rises in Europe, a collection of his war reportage, was first intended to appear in 1943, but was impounded by the German censors. A second edition was destroyed in bombing. The collection finally appeared in 1951 with an English translation in 1957.

The Volga rises in Europe has not attracted the label of great literature. It does not have a fancy new edition. It has a cover of the kind that graced 1970s popular histories of the war. And yet I would argue that if you read only one book by Malaparte on World War II this should be it. Without The Volga Rises as preface, Kaputt is barely intelligible. The Skin, read merely as a sequel to Kaputt rather than as part of a trilogy, also loses much of its meaning. Taken together the three books make a far larger statement about Europe in the mid 20th century than Malaparte is usually credited with.

Unlike both Kaputt and The Skin, The Volga rises shows us Malaparte commenting on the war itself. Unlike in either Kaputt and The Skin, in his journalistic writing Malaparte’s programmatic intellectual project is clearly spelled out. He is involved in updating tropes from Italian futurism of the earlier 20th century, into the context of World War II and the Eastern Front. He wants his readers to understand the war in the East not just as a military clash. He specifically wants to rid us of cliches about West v. East - hence the point in the title that The Volga rises in Europe, not Asia. Malaparte wants to show the war as a civil war between different modes of industrial, mechanized modernity.

“Here, more than on any other sector of the front, it has assumed the form and the significance of an antithesis - not of the usual, too facile antithesis between East and West, between Asia and Europe, but rather of a kind of trial of strength between the two forces that have clashed on the frontiers of Western civilization. Here the West comes face to face with itself, and that too at its most sensitive, most vulnerable point: the point where the most backward and the most modern civilizations of Europe meet, size each other up, pit themselves against each other.”

The original title for the book was War and the Strike Weapon.

In this industrial war, the Germans are, of course, the paradigm. The book starts in June 1941 with Malaparte embedded in a German armored column.

“Far above my head formations of German and Soviet aircraft weaved in and out of enormous banks of fleecy white clouds. And below me, on both sides of the hill, down in the valley and again on the opposite slope, I could see, slowly advancing, not an army, but an immense travelling workshop, an enormous mobile foundry that stretched as far as the eye could reach in either direction. It was as if the thousands of chimneys, cranes, iron bridges and steel towers, the millions of cog-wheels, the hundreds and hundreds of blast-furnaces and rolling-mills of the whole of Westphalia, of the entire Ruhr, were advancing in a body over the vast expanse of corn-fields that is Bessarabia. It was as if an enormous Krupps Steelworks, a gigantic Essen, were preparing to launch an attack on the hills of Zaicani, of Shofroncani, of Bratosheni. Yes, that was it: I was looking not at an army but at a colossal steel-works, in which a multitude of workmen were setting about their various tasks with a streamlined efficiency which at first sight concealed the immensity of their effort. And what amazed me most of all was “was to see this gigantic mobile steelworks ”“ leaving behind it no trail of smoking ruins, no heaps of rubble, no blackened fields, but only peaceful villages and unscathed expanses of corn.”

Malaparte would later claim that he was the only quasi independent journalist to have the privilege of riding with the German armored columns into the Soviet Union. And he communicates in fascinated tones to his readers about the new model of warrior that this war is shaping.

“Dressed in black, their big berets tilted over their ears (each beret has a steel badge in the form of a death's head), the German crews move around their tanks, bend down to examine the tracks, tap the wheels with heavy hammers like railwaymen checking the brakes of carriages. From time to time a man climbs on to a tank, raises the hatch, pops in and out of the giant's belly. A temporary smithy has been erected under a large tree. A soldier turns the handle of the bellows. Another beats with a hammer on an anvil. A third dismantles an engine, others check the pressure of the lorries' tyres. A smell of burning oil, carbonic acid, petrol, and white-hot metal re-creates in the wood the characteristic atmosphere of a smithy. (This is the smell of modern war, this is the authentic smell of mechanized war.) … “I watch them working; I note the way they use their hands, the way they hold things, the way they bend their heads over their implements. They are the same soldiers as I have seen 'working' in the streets of the Banato, outside Belgrade. They have the same impersonal, alert expressions, the same calm, deliberate, precise gestures, the same air of unsmiling equanimity. They reveal the same indifference to everything that is unconnected with their work. It occurs to me that perhaps the peculiarly technical character of this war is leaving its mark on the combatants. Rather than soldiers intent on fighting they look like artisans at work, like mechanics busying themselves about a complex, delicate machine. They bend over a machine-gun and press the trigger, they manipulate the gleaming breech-plug of a field-gun, they grasp the double handle of an anti-aircraft weapon with the same delicate gaucherie, or rather with the same rude dexterity, as they reveal when they tighten a nut, or when, with the palm of the hand, or merely with two fingers, they control the vibrations of a cylinder, the play of a large screw, the pressure of a valve. They[…]” “indeed - they look more like artisans at work than soldiers at war. Their very gait, their very manner of speech, their very gestures are those of workmen, not of soldiers. The wounded have that tight-lipped, slightly angry air of workmen injured in an industrial accident. Their discipline has about it the same flexibility and informality as the discipline maintained by a gang of workmen. Their esprit de corps is an esprit d'équipe, a team spirit, and at the same time it as an esprit de métier. They are bound to their unit by the same bonds of loyalty and affection as unite a team of factory-hands to their machine, a team of electricians to their dynamo, a team of artisans to their lathe, to their boiler, to their rolling-mill. In the mechanized armies of today the officers are the technicians, the N.C.O.s are the foremen, the gangers. This small formation of Panzerwagen is commanded by a sergeant, not by an officer. A corporal is in charge of the twenty lorries. All the men are specialists -that is to say, they are experts at their various trades. They all know what they are expected to do,

The Soviets are not as complete in their industrialization of warfare. But to Malaparte’s eyes they are more remarkable, since the new Soviet man and women are products of no more than a few decades of forced industrialization, urbanization and modernization. It is, therefore, in the Soviet worker-peasant that you truly see the process of making new human beings. What Malaparte seeks to do justice to is:

“the back-breaking effort, the perseverance, the sacrifices, the years and years of technical selection that are required to turn a simple peasant, a builder's labourer, a navvy, in fact a worker of any kind, into a skilled craftsman, a specialist, a 'technician' in the true sense, in the modern sense of the word ….

“At one point during that brief skirmish with the Soviet rearguard I had a vivid impression that the machines were behaving like living creatures, almost like human beings, that they had a will, an intelligence. And those men who walked amid the corn, firing at the hard steel shells of the panzers, seemed to me extraneous to that violent episode, to that terrible clash of machines. I walk over to the Soviet dead, I examine them one by one. They are Mongolians, nearly all of them. They no longer fight as once they did, mounted on the scraggy horses of the steppe, armed only with rifles or long lances. They fight with machines, oiling the parts, listening intently to the throb of the engines. They no longer crouch over a horse's mane, they bend over a dashboard covered with instruments. The Stakanovites of Stalin's Army, the udarniki, the authentic creatures of the Pyatlyetki, the product of Lenin's famous formula, 'Soviet + electrification=Bolshevism,' prove their ability to sustain the terrible, bloody struggle against the soldier-workers of the German Army. (The mechanization of armies involves not only the 'specialization' of labour but the technical training of the masses through the[…]”industrialization of agriculture.

It is only when we understand the symmetry between both sides that we grasp the essence of this gigantic conflict:

Here is the essential meaning of this war, the essential significance of this conflict between Germany and Russia - a conflict not of men alone but of machines, of techniques, of systems of industrialization; a conflict not only between the engineers of Goring and of Stakanov but between National Socialism, with its stupendous feats of reconstruction and organization, and Soviet Communism, with its Pyatlyetki, its Five Year Plans; a conflict, in short, between two peoples who, through industrialization, or rather through the 'mechanization of agriculture,' have acquired not only technical proficiency but that industrial 'morale' which is indispensable to those called upon to fight in this war. The protagonists in this Russian campaign are two armies consisting primarily and essentially of specialized workers and 'industrialized' peasants.) From the manner in which the Soviet soldier fights it is clear that the modern muzhik too is a skilled craftsman, a typical product of the machine age. This is a conflict - the first in history - between two armies in which the military spirit is allied to the industrial spirit, to 'industrial morale', and in which military discipline is blended with technical discipline, with the discipline of organized labour, with the discipline of[…]”“organized labour, with the discipline of the team of specialists.”

The contrast to both Soviet and German troops in the war in the East is provided for Malaparte by the Romanian allies of the Germans, whose cavalry bivouacs are a reminder of a 19th-century mode of war-fighting.

Malaparte starts his campaign on the Southern Front. But in the autumn he shifts from the South to the Northern Front where he witnesses the Axis encirclement of Leningrad. Malaparte, typically, has no time for nostalgia, Whereas André Gide famously quipped that what he loved most about Leningrad was St Petersburg, Malaparte is fascinated by Leningrad’s revolutionary history. Unlike in its campaign in the South, in assaulting Leningrad Nazi Germany is striking at the very heart of revolutionary politics.

““Ahead of us, forming a back-cloth to this battlefield, is one of the largest and most populous cities in the world, one of the greatest of modern metropolises. It is a scene in which the essential elements are not those created by nature - fields, woods, meadows, rivers, lakes - but those created by men: the high grey walls of the workers' houses, pierced by innumerable windows, the factory-chimneys, the bare, rectilinear blocks of glass and concrete, the iron bridges, the colossal cranes of the steelworks, the bells of the gasometers, the gigantic trapezoidal frames of the high-tension electric pylons: a scene which seems to reflect, with the precision of an X-ray photograph, the true nature, the essential, secret nature, of this war, in all its technical, industrial, and social aspects, in all its modern significance of a war of machines, of a technical and social war: an austere scene, smooth and compact as a wall, as the boundary-wall of an immense factory. Nor will such an image appear arbitrary to anyone who considers that Leningrad, this former capital of the Russia of the Tzars, this capital of the Communist revolution of October, 1917, is the greatest industrial city in the U.S.S.R., … Today Leningrad is in its death-agony. Its factories are empty, deserted, its machines are silent, its blast-furnaces are extinguished. The arms of its powerful steam-hammers, their great steel fists poised aloft in the sinister silence, are broken. Of its eight hundred thousand workers some have been transferred to the industrial centres of the East, beyond the Volga, beyond the Urals, some have been drafted into the 'technical' commandos of specialized workers and Party activists (spyetsi and Stakanovites), specially constituted with a view to a desperate, last-ditch defence of the city.” … “The defensive tactics adopted by the military and political authorities in Leningrad are in many respects, and particularly in their basic principles, the same as those employed by the revolutionary Committee in 1917 against the Cossacks of the Dikaya Diviziya, the 'Savage Division,' and later against the 'Whites' of General Yudenich. The nerve and sinew of Leningrad's resistance are provided, now as then, by the workers in the metallurgical industry and the sailors of the Baltic Fleet.” … “Last summer, hanging on a wall in the assembly-room of the Soviet House at Soroki, on the Dniester, alongside the usual maps of the U.S.S.R., the usual coloured charts containing agricultural and industrial propaganda, the usual posters issued by the Ossoaviakhim (the propaganda-organization for chemical warfare and aviation), alongside the inevitable portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Voroshilov and Budenny, I found the original topographical plan of the October insurrection, comprising an ordnance-map of Leningrad with the dispositions of all the revolutionary forces (distribution of Commands, deployment of shock-troops, workers' brigades, etc.) shown in red in the minutest detail.” “That topographical plan of the October rising might very well serve to illustrate the basic features of the current defence of Leningrad. It is probable - indeed, it is quite certain - that the purely tactical dispositions - the distribution of Commands, etc. - are different from those of 1917, and that the headquarters of the Soviet Military Command are not located in the Smolny Institute. (I should not wonder however, if that building were now the headquarters of the political Command.) But from all the news and information that reaches the Finnish General Staff from inside the beleaguered city it emerges clearly and unmistakably that Leningrad's resistance is far more political than military in its inspiration. It is, in fact, to the exceptional importance of Leningrad as capital of the October revolution and as the citadel of Communist extremism that the resistance in question owes its special political and social character.” … In a sense, this siege marks the return of the proletariat of Leningrad (which from the Marxist viewpoint is the most advanced and the most intransigent in the whole of the U.S.S.R.) to the Communist spirit, as well as to the tactics of the civil war.” “The squads of armed workers, lacking military training but technically very efficient and animated by the most violent fanaticism, retain the characteristics of those shock-brigades of spyetsi, udarniki and stakanovtsi which were formed in the course of fifteen years of total industrialization and of Pyatlyetki or Five Year Plans.”

In a highly imaginative way, Malaparte imagines that the inner politics of Leningrad during the siege of 1941-1943 must echo not only with the history of the revolution in 1917 but also with the the Kronstadt uprising and its brutal suppression.

“First-hand news has been received of serious discontent, of bitter party strife, of a growing tendency to subordinate wholly military problems to those of a purely political nature. The Left Wing of the Communist Party, with which the overwhelming majority of the proletariat of Leningrad identifies itself, grows daily more outspoken in its criticism of the political and military authorities in Moscow, whom it accuses of having failed to adopt, in their conduct of the war, what the extremists call 'Communist strategy'.” “Many will recall the ferocious policy of repression carried out by Lenin in 1920 (This is a misdating. The uprising was in 1921, AT) against the workers of Leningrad and the sailors of Kronshtadt, in other words against the 'old guard' of the Revolution, which was accused of menacing the solidarity of the Party and of endangering the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The memory of these massacres is still alive in the minds of the working masses of the revolutionary capital and of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, and this will certainly not make for a conciliatory attitude on the part of Leningrad and Kronshtadt in the event of a political rift with Moscow”

Leningrad, like Paris in the 19th century, is more than merely the second city of the Soviet Union, it is the true revolutionary capital. The defense of the city, Malaparte imagines as inspired both by the spirit and the tactics of the revolutionary militarism of 1917. The great guns of the Soviet fleet pound the Axis lines. The banner of the cruiser Aurora is raised in 1941 over Kronstadt.

Remarkably, Malaparte, who as Italian military attache witnessed the Russo-Polish war of 1920, also draws a parallel to that other great besieged city of revolution, Madrid.

“Its topographical design (the defenses of Lenigrad) is distinctly reminiscent of Vauban; and, as an example of the art (in which the Communists excel) of transforming a modern city into a fortress, it shows unmistakable signs of having been based on the experience of Madrid. (In the matter of siege-warfare the experience of Madrid is still topical today. And a chapter apart could well be devoted to discussion of the indisputable fact that the Communists have shown, alike in the Spanish Civil War and in the present campaign in Russia, a supreme mastery of the technique of defending a city even against an army equipped with”

But, fascinated as he is by the Red Army soldiers that are brought in as POWs or defectors, Malaparte is even more impressed by the Finns. For Malaparte the absolute epitome of a new kind of societal war are the Finns. He sees them as fighting to defend a social democratic civilization. They are modern men, but no mere mechanics. They fight in highly organized and well-motivated teams, epitomized by their lethal ski troops, who at night sail out onto the winter ice to assault the vast steel mass of Soviet battleships.

Malaparte’s commentary on the Leningrad siege peters out in 1942. Whereas in 1941 Leningrad was at the heart of the war, by 1942 the central focus of the world historic struggle has moved on.

“the red factory-buildings the engines, the machines, the tools of shining steel lie dying on the concrete floors. The deserted streets, littered with dead horses and gutted vehicles, are reflected through the windows in the misty mirrors of the imperial palaces. An atmosphere of lethargy, of repose, almost of remoteness veils and softens the forms and aspects of the war. Already Leningrad has ceased to be a part of our age, already it has moved on to the margin of this time of strife.”

It is in the burned out aftermath of the great struggles that 1941 that Kaputt begins. If you read Kaputt against the backdrop of The Volga rises the contrast is electrifying. Whereas the first book gives us sharp-edged sociology and history, with Kaputt it as though we enter a nightmarish, hallucinatory dream, in which both the horrible present and the events of 1941 constantly reappear before us.

This shift is anticipated by Malaparte’s haunting account in The Volga rises of his visit to the home of Ilya Repin, the great Ukrainian-Russian realist painter, who after the revolution had chosen self-exile in a villa on the Finnish side of the border, close to what was now Leningrad. The visit to Repin’s villa also features in Kaputt. But again, in the earlier book, Malaparte is more explicit. He spells out the way in which the 19th century furnishings conjure up for him the surrealism of the 20th century. As Malaparte remarks about the interior decoration:

“Despite its age, it is astonishingly reminiscent of the surrealist furniture of Salvador Dali, of the sculptures of Giacometti, of the plastic creations of Archipenko, of the tables and chairs with women's legs, the chair-backs embellished with carvings of young breasts, and the armchairs resembling seated girls, which characterize - I will not say adorn - Hugo's settings for Cocteau's Orphée, the interiors of the surrealist painters, the photographs of Max Ernst. Those features which surrealism has borrowed from the taste of the fin de siècle Europe of the last years of Queen Victoria, and from that of the precious bourgeois age of Fallieres, D'Annunzio, and Jean Lorrain, represent”“an inheritance which not even Salvador Dali can ignore: and it is singularly gratifying to find in the house of Repin, situated in this suburb of Leningrad, within range of the guns of Kronstadt, these archetypes of the most bizarre and Freudian forms of modern surrealist furniture.)”

The stress on anachronism becomes explicit when Malaparte and his companion find Repin’s tomb stone:

… “The cross is no longer there; the Bolsheviks have removed it and, in accordance with their custom, have erected on the mound a wooden pillar, on which are inscribed in letters of fire, the name of Repin, his date of birth - 1844 - and the year of his death - 1930. It seems as though he had been dead a hundred years, so legendary is his world, so remote his age. He was a contemporary of the Russian master-spirits of the nineteenth century. He survived Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Turgeniev, Mussorgsky. He even survived himself. He died in a foreign land, an exile not so much from his country as from his age, from his world. ”

The analysis of anachronism and the association with surrealism that are laid out so clearly in The Volga rises, are the key to understanding the mysterious imagery of Kaputt.

Kaputt is a nightmarish tour through the degenerate upper class civilization of Axis Europe, impelled by a surrealist eye and with the genocidal horror of the war on the Eastern Front, which Malaparte largely brackets in The Volga, put back in.

This framing of Kaputt is anticipated by the account of Malaparte’s visit to the Repin villa, but also in a scene in which Malaparte in August 1941, in Soroki (on the Dniester), stumbles out of the mayhem of a town under bombardment into the faded elegance of a bourgeois family home, where the traditions of 19th century gentility are still compulsively enacted. Here he witnesses an old Europe continuing with old habits of courtesy and form that are literally being blown to pieces all around them.

Beyond this genteel setting Malaparte gives us in The Volga rises only occasional glimpses of the violence unleashed by the war. Overall his account of the early days of the campaign is sanitized. It is only once the fighting intensifies later in the summer, and he sees more of the occupation that his guard slips. Glimpses of an alternate reality appear in short, shocking passages that Malaparte marks as having been removed by the censors.

At one point Malaparte casually remarks that he would not give a penny for the chances of a group of Jews and peasants who have been rounded up for “looting”. Clearly, mass execution was just a fact of life. In another passages, which he claims was cut by the censored, he alludes to the brutal murder of a young woman on a collective farm. In another passage he describes how Ukrainian peasants seek to reconsecrate a chapel that had been degraded to an oil seed store by the Soviets. Watching the peasants at work, a German officer casually order his horses to be stabled in the same building.

For all the horror that he is describing, Malaparte’s tone is noticeably cool. As he insists to his readers, his interest in morality is not for the sake of making normative judgements. His interest is sociological.

“… of course, by 'moral’ qualities I do not mean those which are associated with personal conduct, with the notion of good and evil. I use the word in a sociological and technical sense, not merely in a human sense.”

The basic question that animates his writing, could be taken to be: what kind of moral systems are at work in the war?

Machine civilization gives us new forms of morality and solidarity. In one unforgettable passage he describes how a Soviet POW is drawn out of his reserve by his fascination with a German tank. When the prisoner notices a loose bolt on the tracks, his anxious gaze alerts a German mechanic, who thanks him for noticing the problem they had missed during their routine daily check. What bonds the men together, across all the deep differences of conflict and culture, is the common care for machinery.

As Malaparte remarks, this is a deeply secular civilization. On the Soviet side in particular, he claims, there is no conception of an after life. Visiting a Soviet cemetery outside Leningrad, unleashes a startling train of association in Malaparte:

“And now this deep, muffled, rhythmical boom, this cadenced hammering on the grey steel plate of the horizon, reverberates amid the frozen silence not like the boom of gunfire but like the banging of an iron mallet on a strip of metal. I almost have the impression that this cemetery has just been abandoned by an army of workers. For, by a strange association of ideas, it reminds me of a factory-yard after an abortive strike: when, in the sinister light of defeat, machines, tools, everything assumes an unwonted appearance, an almost abject appearance of melancholy and desolation. At such a time the idle machines resemble strange beasts of steel standing motionless outside a closed door, before a smooth, solid white wall. They are like symbols of a vitality strained to the precise limit beyond which no machine can continue to function.”

This is a civilization without conventional constraints. At its upper levels, notably in the upper class of the Axis powers, as Malaparte shows in the savage satire of Kaputt, it is steeped in denial and hypocrisy.

In Kaputt which unfolds principally between 1942 and 1943, Malaparte’s personal position is only intelligible if you understand him as the author of the reportage collected in The Volga rises. He is by this time notorious across Europe for his reporting. This is why he is indulged at illustrious dinner tables as a gadfly, but this is also why he has to deal warily with the Gestapo and why his itinerary through Axis Europe is eccentric and centered on Finland. He may not be safe in Germany.

The narrative frame of Kaputt is formed by lavish feasts and dinner table conversations with a grotesque array of dignatories and aristos. What drives the text along, are the moments in which banter tips suddenly into more or less horrifying reminiscences of events at the front, or in the ghettos of Bessarabia or occupied Poland. If The Volga Rises is marked by restraint when it comes to the horror of the war, Kaputt is characterized by surreal disinhibition. Whereas in the presence of the machine warrior of The Volga rises, Malaparte adopted a position of humility, the theme of Kaputt is the utter degeneracy of the European upper class. Compared to the stark, hands-on truths of the frontline, compared to the life and death struggle for the future that is at the heart of the war, Malaparte presents himself to us in Kaputt as shocking the drawing-room world of the Axis elite into reality by means of savage satire and the most extreme rhetorical provocation.

Reading the books sixty years later, one cannot help wondering whether we don’t need a Malaparte for our own age of polycrisis.

And then you get to The Skin ….

It was the increasingly obvious defeat of the Axis war effort that drew Malaparte back to Italy in the summer of 1943. Whereas Kaputt only really becomes intelligible once we read The Volga rises, The Skin can stand alone. Its account of Naples - one of the most ancient city of Western Europe - prostituting itself to its Allied occupiers, can be read without further context. Those who are tempted to think that Malaparte may be exaggerating are invited to check out Norman Lewis’s Naples ‘44, which describes a shockingly similar scene from the vantage point of a British occupation officer.

The Skin, it should be said, is disturbing and obnoxious in every way. The first pages of the book are an unsparing account of racial politics of the city, rendered in the argot of the time. The chapter “Black Wind”, which is perhaps the toughest to read, juxtaposes the agonizingly protracted death of an American soldier by disembowelment, the vivisection of Malaparte’s own dog and the crucifixion of a group of Jewish men in Ukraine.

This is a truly horrifying book. It is also unforgettable.

But if, rather than reading them separately, we juxtapose all three books - Volga-Kaputt-Skin - we realize that Malaparte is painting a tripytch of the war.

The decadence of old Europe in Kaputt is framed on one side by Malaparte’s analysis of the ethic of the machine war in The Volga rises, and on the other side by Naples and Italy, whose population are fighting not so much for their lives, a struggle which for Malaparte is inherently full of meaning, but to avoid death, which means simply to save their skins - hence the title of the book.

In Malaparte’s writing this triptych of struggle is rendered not in the abstract but viscerally, in the most literal sense. On the one hand there is mass rape by both sides on the Eastern front, which Malaparte hints at but does not elaborate, on the other there is the sale of bodies of every kind for every form of sexual gratification, the gruesomely explicit theme of The Skin.

Though The Skin, is a horrifying book, Malaparte stays true to his manifesto. His aim is not to judge but to understand the “moral” logics of action. To this end he spells out the way in which Neapolitan hustlers bought and sold the right to fleece American soldiers, particularly African-American soldiers who were thought to be particularly easy to part from their money. He spells out the logic and the geography of the market for child sex, as he also describes the progressive plundering of the Neapolitan aquarium, which culminates in a scene in which a horrified dinner table of occupation officers and visitors from America are served a fish that resembles nothing more than a naked, young girl who has been boiled alive.

Already in The Volga rises Malaparte had suggested an association between US and Soviet machine culture, which by the 1930s was already something of a cliché. As he remarks:

(Beneath the surface of Communism there is a surprising undercurrent of 'Americanism'.) Elements of 'Americanism' are very evident in Soviet life and Soviet philosophy. They recur like a refrain not only in various public assertions and well-known formulas of Lenin (his 'American' definition of Bolshevism as the equivalent of 'Soviet+electrification' is proverbial), but also in certain of his characteristic manias, which became more and more obtrusive during the last months of his life, when he lay dying in a villa near Moscow. In the days that preceded his death Lenin spent hours and hours stretched out in an armchair drawing the outlines of machines and skyscrapers with a pencil on odd scraps of paper. In the Lenin Museum, Moscow, an entire wall is covered with these drawings. They include dynamos, cranes, steel bridges and skyscrapers - scores of skyscrapers, a whole vast panorama of enormous, highly elaborate skyscrapers. Undoubtedly the man was the victim of a kind of obsession. (Incidentally, a whole literature has been written on the subject of this relationship between the American 'ethic' and the Soviet 'ethic', between 'Americanism' and 'Soviet-ism' - an extremely interesting literature, comprising reports by technicians and workers from America, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Scandinavia, etc., who have found employment in Soviet industry. They are for the most part brief, simple documents, based on an experience - sometimes hard, but always highly interesting - of three, four or five years in the factories and shipyards, in the kolkhozi and mines of the Soviet Union, and published by responsible firms whose impartiality is beyond question. All are agreed on the 'American' character of the Communist 'ethic' and of Communist society. The reader will come to understand many things, not least” “about the political relations of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., if he takes account of this analogy.)”

From this vantage point it might be said that both The Volga rises and The Skin describe Europe under the impact of “American”-machinic civilization.

But the juxtaposition of the first and third books of this trilogy actually suggests something more disturbing. In the war that Malaparte witnessed in 1941, he is able to imagine the Germans, the Soviets and the Finns as engaged in a civil war of machine civilizations, each with their own logic, each with its own ethic, unified by a common historical moment. Leningrad, a city stamped out of the ground by Peter the Great a mere 200 years before, is a giant fortress of industrial and revolutionary politics, a model for Stalingrad in 1942-1943. Naples, with its millennia of history, offers a stark contrast. Malaparte describes a surging mass of people, not disorganized or merely chaotic, but animated by a horrifyingly anachronistic combination of ancient rites and rituals, the new promise of freedom and liberation trumpeted by the Americans , and the naked struggle for bare life.

This, of course, has a backdrop. Naples was not always like this. Between September 27 and 30 1943, a large part of the city’s working-class had risen heroically in revolt against the German occupiers. The city that the Allies occupied was not for nothing exhausted and traumatized. Many were disillusioned by the emptying out of meaning produced by Fascism and its collapse. The horror of German repression and Allied bombing inflicted relentless terror. But Malaparte will allow no evasion. It is the presence of the Allies themselves, their limitless affluence, their willingness to bury history under the promise of freedom that unleashes in this ancient city a new and utterly disinhibited “civilization”, organized around bare life and the economy of bodies.

Malaparte does not place himself outside this horror. In WWI he was a combatant himself. In this war he is not a fighter. But he wants to be there. He wants to see. He wants to hear. He never says no.

He describes visiting the brothels where Jewish women are worked to the point of exhaustion before being shot to death. He witnesses some of the most grotesque scenes in Naples and does not hide from the nausea, disgust and rage this induces in him and the American officers he accompanies. He was a fascist of the first phase of struggle in Italy and he makes no secret of the contempt and suspicion that this earns him from some on the left. Kaputt and The Skin turn entirely on his experience and narration and on his notoriety and fame.

In Kaputt, in every conversation in which Malaparte participates, he lets us know that he is always already marked as the edgy war correspondent. Everyone he speaks to knows that he wrote the pieces collected in The Volga rises. Likewise, in The Skin he appears as the author of Kaputt, which by that point was already a controversial wartime literary sensation. This extreme self-consciousness renders the entire relationship with the reader fragile. We as readers, like the people that Malaparte describes himself conversing with in Kaputt and The Skin, are left wondering who we are actually dealing with.

Malaparte wants us to know that he was himself highly conscious of this tension and, in a characteristically grotesque move, he exploits this to full effect.

In 1944 at a dinner he is challenged by allied officers about the veracity of his account in Kaputt. Malaparte responds by staging a provocation. Earlier in the conversation the Allied officers had been discussing the dangers posed by German booby-traps for unwary troops. That day a soldier had been badly wounded. As he listens to the fellow diners casting doubt on Kaputt, Malaparte surreptitiously arranges the bones in his stew to resemble the dismembered hand of the maimed soldier. He then calmly announces that his hosts have unwittingly served him the flesh of their own infantryman for dinner. Rather than scoffing at him, or calling his bluff, his hosts react with nausea and horror.

The point is made. Doubt Kaputt if you like. Clearly, Malaparte is having his way with us. But who at this point can any longer tell, what is fiction and what is grotesque truth? And who would dare to err on the side of caution? Malaparte’s account of the 20th century leaves us in a liar’s paradox of horror.

***

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Alberto Burri, Italian visual artist

In 2024 global corporate bond issuance returned to pre-COVID trend

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Eibar painter Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945), “Women of Sepúlveda”.

The great wealth avalanche

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José Chávez Morado (Mexican, 1909-2002). “Víctima del bombardeo / Aerial Bombing Casualty” (1939). Source: MMoCA

No wonder the crypto lobby rallied so hard behind Trump!

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La partida, Gare d'Austerlitz, París, 1883 (The Departure, Gare DAusterlitz, Paris, 1883 )Paul Louis Delance

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Manuel Felguérez, Iron Mural (detail), 1960. Courtesy of MUAC.

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Boris Alekseevich Smirnov-Rusetsky (Russian, 1905-1993). “Burnt Forest.” Source: Archive

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The vertiginous panic of the financial crisis, the protracted eurozone crisis that followed, the Occupy movement and the “inequality moment”, BLM, mounting anxiety about fascistoid politics, the radicalization of the climate crisis, escalating geopolitical tension, all this and more has led to a search for big, urgent, powerful frames of analysis. Anything less seems inadequate to the moment.

One of the responses on the progressive political side has been a return to what you might call classical foundations. For some this was Marxism. For others, myself included, it involved a return to Keynes, left Keynesianism and currents like MMT and the Green New Deal.

This turn was “necessary”. It has been intellectually and politically productive. But it also came at a price.

What I worry about is a double evasion of history, both “real” and intellectual, if such a distinction may be permitted:

a. In real terms: by anchoring critique in classical social theories that were shaped above all by the 1900-1950 moment, we risk underestimating the radicalism of the present. This is not to underestimate the dramas of the early 20th century - I hope I may be spared that accusation. But to insist on the novelty, unprecedented scale and pace of our current predicament. This is true in three dimensions:

1. the sheer scale and resources of modern economic growth and technology extending to billions of people and the huge power this confers on small groups of elites.

2. The new multipolar (nuclear) arms race.

3. The multifaceted and escalating environmental crisis.

The ecological crisis now must be the pace-setter and the paradigm of all other critical thinking. Taken together these three tendencies mark out our epoch as unprecedented.

b. In intellectual terms, by returning to the classical roots of critical social theory in the early 20th century, we “skip over” the often troubling and complex development of critical social thought between the 1960s and the early 2000s. To put it bluntly, there has been a retrogression in social theory.

For those of my generation, raised in the 1970s and 1980s, coming of age in the 1990s and 2000s, the shock of 2008 provoked a kind of rejuvenation. But it has also implied a break with our own intellectual genealogy. This covering-over is never complete. “You can take the boy out of the 1990s, but you can’t take the 1990s out of the boy”. The layering of historical phases has led to opacity and, at times, to inter-generational confusion.

As Barnaby Raine recently framed it, my intellectual formation in the post-Marxist 1980s and early 1990s has remained present, and yet tacitly so.

My PhD supervisor @adam_tooze belongs among varied intellectuals (Therborn, David Scott, Chakrabarty, Hall etc) seeking social theory after the collapse of dialectical History. I've long thought this is underplayed in his books, which are presented as narrative histories... /1 When I first read the 'Crashed' manuscript, for example, I said "I don't get what relationship you're tracing between economy and politics." Once he explained the Latourian logic, the refusal of those two conceptual bundles, the book made sense to me; but it didn't before. I wanted him to publish a reply to Perry Anderson, because I was struck that PA took the lack of a Marxist account of totality as evidence of a (politically motivated, anti-radical) refusal of any such account, which seemed to eclipse the interesting possibility: that in a world no longer structured by (mediations of) a fundamental class antagonism with immanent emancipatory content, we have to go back to the drawing board - philosophically *and* politically - to account for our present, and the proper response to it. Narrative history and Latour meet here. Both refuse any given theory of structure, against whose backdrop agents can then be read. I think Marxism could still be helpful in understanding the appeal of that choice: The crisis of a Marxist theory of social structure followed the disassembly of the emancipatory coalition of the defeated 1960s-70s world revolution. When the standpoint collapsed, so did the theory, which fits with Lukacs or Gramsci (minus their optimistic teleology). Like the four figures I mentioned above, Tooze was recruited to the revolutionary left when young and then attracted to a 1980s revisionism (Eurocommunism in his case) that claimed to speak to Brecht's 'bad new things' not the good old ones. These accounts - I find Scott's the richest - usually suppose that something was always missed by neat dialectical History (not least its usual Eurocentrism) but also that neoliberalism marks a rupture more fundamental than a 'forward march' halted, with its agents enduring. Clearly, these claims are contestable. But Anderson's difficulty is that he too has long suggested such an intellectual crisis for Marxism, from his famous 1976/83 book duo to his sensitive 90s essay on Fukuyama and then NLR relaunch essay in 2000. I think the hard question (my PhD question!) is whether some concept of freedom beyond relations of subordination can survive the end of History, the disassembly of freedom's assumed subjects. Tooze doesn't ask that, but answering it will require a rethought social theory. At stake here is both the scale of the historical rupture - what endures? - and its character: what is possible in new times? I think we require first the open investigation ('without guarantees') of processes of subject formation, the ground of political struggle and norms. If this all feels like the 90s replayed, my hope is that now we are trying to tell new stories (hence Tooze's triadic Foucault/Latour/Keynes amalgam) not just bemoan the death of old ones

In reaction to critics like Anderson and exchanges with comrades like Barnaby Raine, since 2020 I’ve appropriated the “found concept” of polycrisis from the foot-loose French thinker Edgar Morin as a way of highlighting this tension.

To the frustration of its many critics, the concept of polycrisis lacks the respectable intellectual genealogy and analytical guts that a good critical theorist would expect. To me, that is precisely why it seems right for our moment. In its lack of specification, the polycrisis concept serves as a reminder of the indeterminacy and uncertainty and complexity that we have lost amidst the bold new certainties of the “capitalocene”.

The idea that going back to the social theory of the post-Marxist moment of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s could actually be a mind-opening move is, admittedly, counter-intuitive. On the left that era is often seen as a moment of disorientation and closure. I am certainly not arguing for a simple historical appropriation. 2008 happened. We can no more go back to the future by way of the 1990s than we can by way of the 1930s. What I appreciate about the theorizing of the “before (2008) times” is its open-endedness. My wager is, that it is precisely that open-endedness that we need, to encompass the radicalism of our current moment.

In the interview with Ding Xiongfei of the Shanghai Review of Books, we discussed Bruno Latour and Ulrich Beck, two theorists who grappled with radical novelty, and who opened the conventional frame of social theory in so doing. For all their basic conceptual differences, they also shared a sense of the catastrophic potential of modernity, which in the late work of Latour became truly dramatic.

In subsequent posts in this mini-series - the reason for the choice of title will, I hope, become clear later in this post - I want to repeat this maneuver with regard to interpretations of globalization and globality offered in the 1990s and early 2000s by anthropologists Anna Tsing and Arjun Appadurai and historians Michael Geyer and Charles Bright. My hunch is that in revisiting their complex articulations of the first wave of post Cold War globalization, we may gain some new purchase on the present crisis.

In the Maeder lecture, which I had the privilege of giving at the New School in November last year, I returned to the polycrisis term and situated it in relation to the fundamental critique of capitalocentric versions of social theory offered by feminist anthropologist pairing, K Gibson-Graham in The End of Capitalism, (1996).

The video of the lecture is here.

The powerpoint for the talk, adapted for pdf format - I’ve tried to reproduce the animation of the slides through sequences of pdf gages - can be downloaded here.

Tooze Maeder Lecture Pdf

2.58MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The discussion after the lecture was spirited and left me feeling that the argument can perhaps best be crystallized as follows:

The central problem of the present is how to think the radical novelty of our situation. How far can conventional crisis theory do justice to our current moment? The ecological crisis now must be the pace-setter and the paradigm of all other critical thinking. We have to take seriously the implications of the graph that maps all of modern economic history in terms of CO2 emissions and unmistakably highlights the utter novelty and radicalism of our current moment.

To put it crudely, most of classical critical theory was formulated in the left-hand half of this graph which, as one can see with the naked eye, has little if any serious bearing on our current predicament. You could say that patterns of fossil capitalism were laid down in the 19th- and early 20th centuries, structures were established. But quantities matter. And the great global acceleration since World War II has turned quantity into quality.

What preoccupies me is Mark Blyth’s dramatic 2021 description of our current predicament: “climate breakdown … is a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities. In plain English, there is no mean, there is no average, there is no return to normal. It’s one way traffic into the unknown.” The essential question is this: Can critical social theory come to terms with this reality? “No mean, no average, no return to normal .. one way traffic into the unknown”?

After debating with Nancy Fraser and other New School colleagues, there are, as far as I can see, four different responses to this challenge:

1. The first is to insist that polycrisis is nothing new. It is just the latest form of the kind of crises that Marxists have always thought themselves good at analyzing. Some blend of Marx on the ecological rift, Gramsci and Polanyi with racial capitalism thrown into the mix, will do the trick. The underlying hypothesis underpinning this theoretical stretch from the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s into the present, is one of structural continuity. The Great Transformation that Polanyi diagnosed is still meaningful to us today. Gramsci’s idea of interregnum still illuminates our reality.

This seems to me to be a gamble at long odds and one that severely underestimates the radical break marked by the great acceleration since 1945. How is this kind of intellectual immobilism consistent with the protean and spectacular change that defines our moment? Nor do I see how it is consistent with the radical intellectual tradition, to which it declares its loyalty, a tradition, which from the late 19th century onwards was not rehearsing the classics, but was on the move, with Lenin as the great iconoclast.

2. A second position is that the term polycrisis does indeed indicate a new degree, complexity, intensity and urgency of problems. Theory must develop to face this. But, the outlines of this kind of new and more complex crisis theory were diagnosed at the latest in the 1960s and 1970s. This was the moment at which class conflict, accumulation crises on both sides of the Iron Curtain, anti-colonial struggles, struggles over identity, new challenges like environmentalism first converged. This is what Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall were pointing to with their conception of overdetermination.

In Gibson-Graham’s words: “Althusser's overdetermination can be variously (though not exhaustively) understood as signaling the irreducible specificity of every determination; the essential complexity - as opposed to the root simplicity - of every form of existence;7 the openness or incompleteness of every identity; the ultimate unfixity of every meaning; and the correlate possibility of conceiving an acentric - Althusser uses the term "decentered"8 - social totality that is not structured by the primacy of any social element or location.” Gibson-Graham “Capitalism and Anti-Essentialism” in the End of Capitalism, 27.

The current moment vindicates the theoretical prescience of Althusser and Hall from half a century ago. Now is an exciting moment to think with them and through them.

3. The third position admits that position 2 is easy to agree with. The agenda laid out by Althusser, Hall and others is attractive. As Gibson-Graham put it: "Althusser's concept of overdetermination can be seen as the site of a longing or desire - to resuscitate the suppressed, to make room for the absent, to see what is invisible, to account for what is unaccounted for, to experience what is forbidden.”

But it poses the question: Who has actually delivered on that agenda? As K Gibson-Graham show in the End of Capitalism, whilst pointing to overdetermination, actually producing an account in terms of overdetermination has proven elusive and more often than not analysis slides back into the simplicity of the first position. On their reading this isn’t accidental. Gibson-Graham drawing on queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick criticized the overly tight and coherent conception of reality implied by standard social theory. It is that underlying set of assumptions - ontological if we may be so bold - that repeatedly frustrate the intention of the analysts of overdetermination.

Gibson-Graham illustrate this with regard to Kosofsky Sedgwick’s so-called ‘Christmas effect”.

What would breaking this monolithic representation of power entail? It would involve a social theory which allowed meanings and institutions to be “at loose ends with each other”:

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). Queer(y)ing Capitalist Organization. Organization, 3(4), 541-545.

I find Gibson-Graham’s critique of conventional social theory to be highly persuasive and illuminating. Since they wrote, the emergence of even more totalizing concepts, such as, for instance, the capitalocene, only demonstrates how relevant and urgent that critique remains.

If stabilizing an account of overdetermination is difficult in practice, then to keep those radical and unsettling possibilities in mind we need irritating ideas that provoke non-essentializing thoughts. This heuristic is the best justification, it seems to me, for evoking irritating and incomplete concepts like “polycrisis”.

Polycrisis is underspecified. It is a weak theory. But those who criticize that in the name of greater clarity or stronger theory underestimate the scale of the mess that we are in. Polycrisis is useful precisely because it reminds us of the knowledge crisis, the gap between inherited critical theory and the radicalism of our present.

This kind of thinking is necessarily going to feel provisional and mobile and unsatisfactory. This is precisely what one expect from non-essentializing accounts that cannot and don’t want to offer the certainty of resolution/conclusion/category etc. They are on the move, rootless and, to a degree, fugitive.

4. Where I feel we must move on from Gibson-Graham, however, is with regard to the underlying emplotment and diagnosis of the present.

For Gibson-Graham, writing in the late 1990s, their intention in introducing their radical critique of capitalocentric conceptions of political economy was to query power and to break the grip of hegemonic ideology. My proposition is less optimistic .

My suggestion is not so much that capitalocentric readings of modernity tend to lead us to underestimate the possibilities for radical agency, but that they tend to lead us to underestimate the scope for catastrophe. A world at loose ends with itself may have more degrees of freedom, but it also has novel and terrifying scope for crisis.

The escalation of the environmental crisis, the emergence of multi-polar great power competition (the escalation of regional conflicts articulated with the tripolar nuclear arms race) and the extraordinary acceleration of oligarchic wealth (Musk) create a novel situation with new catastrophic potential. This catastrophic potential might be thought of as impelled by the violence of “hyper agency”, the magnitude of environmental blowbacks (as witnessed for instance in the form of a pandemic), or the sheer meaningless of public discourse - an attrition that goes beyond ideology, which could, at least, be said to serve an instrumental purpose.

A world at “loose ends with itself” might be precisely the kind of conceptualization we need to grasp out current moment as “a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities. In plain English, there is no mean, there is no average, there is no return to normal. It’s one way traffic into the unknown.”

***

Thank you for reading Chartbook Newsletter. It is rewarding to write. I love sending it out for free to readers around the world. But it takes a lot of work. What sustains the effort are voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. If you are enjoying the newsletter and would like to join the group of supporters click below. As a token of appreciation you will receive the full Top Links emails several times per week.

Subscribe now

LEE BAE KOREA, B. 1956 FROM FIRE, 2000-2016.

This ain’t stimulus!

Between 2020 and 2022 the period when the real estate crisis really hit China, the budget deficit was contracting as a share of GDP → fiscal drag to the tune of several percentage points of GDP. Since 202…

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Pablo O'Higgins (1904 - 1983), “Electricista”, 1953.

American politics and society have a VERY hard time coming to terms with the basic logic of this graph!

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Vincenzo Abbati (Italian, 1803-1866). “Ingresso della grotta di Posillipo olio su tela” (1835). Source: Artnet

Call it US exceptionalism, call it the roaring 20s .. one way or another we need a name for this.

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Joaquín Sorolla Another Margarita (1892).

You have to admit, its impressive.

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Giulio Paolini (GENOVA, 1940) Senza Titolo

Trump wants the Panama canal back

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