Breakout working group from a session at Fearless Cities on 'Building non-state Institutions'. Bertie Russell.The last decade has been a miserable decade. As the global capitalist socio-economic system continues to seize up, and as inequality deepens both between and across nations, the Global North has been met with a reactionary nationalist backlash. This backlash has been fuelled by the common narrative that it is malevolent ‘outsiders’ that are the cause of our problems – Mexicans, European migrants, the poor, the disabled, the working class, and so on. From so-called ‘moderate’ politicians to blood-baying ethno-nationalists, the response has been to empower those calling for a resurgence of the nation-state – to put up boundaries, borders and walls and to expel all those individuals and institutions allegedly intent on benefiting at our expense.
This nationalist backlash is based on a fundamental misconception – that if only it was possible to reinstate a parochial and ‘sovereign’ nation-state, it would be possible to ‘take back control’. That our collapsing wages, surging living costs, and hollowing out of social support has been a result of being ‘exposed’ to globalisation, and that if we could only reinstate some well-managed ‘good British/ American/ French capitalism’ then we’d all be enjoying our bread and roses.
All this fails to recognise that deindustrialization, the offshoring of production, exposure to cheap imports, and the emergence of huge personal debt, are not the result of the mismanagement of the economy. To the contrary, these strategies (amongst others such as installing puppet dictatorships, ‘structurally readjusting’ trade rules, privatizing social goods and ‘financialization’) are part of an ideological response to the systemic capitalist crisis of the 1970s. These are not symptoms of a system going wrong, but rather a concerted attempt to ‘offset’ crisis and restore profitability to an ailing economic system.
