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[Music] welcome to today's iiea seminar we're delighted to be joined today by professor quinn slobodian slobodian marion butler maclean associate
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professor of history of ideas at wellesley college his topic today is crack up capitalism profiting from fear in the time of the pandemic so economic crisis um covet world disruption the future of
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capitalism it's all there um he's going to speak to us for about 20 minutes or so and then we move on to the q a with our audience you'll be able to join the discussion using the q a function on zoom on your
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screen there and please feel free to send your questions throughout the session and we'll come to them once professor sabotian has finished this presentation just to remind you that today's
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presentation and the q a are all on the record um please do join the discussion on twitter as well and please use the handle at ii so now to introduce professor quinn
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sabodian he's the author of the book globalists the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism where he traces ideas unusual lesser examined ideas about the origins
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of neoliberalism right back to the breakup of the austro-hungarian empire and to strands of thought that um maybe are slightly unexpected was published by
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harvard university press in 2018 and offers an enormous amount of insight into the variety of ideas that we call neoliberalism in our current era he's a visiting associate professor at
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brown university's watson institute for international public affairs for 2022 and marion butler mclean associate professor of the history of ideas at wellesley college he's also an associate fellow at chatham house and
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co-director of the history and political economy project funded by the hewlett foundation a new book coming out quite soon on capitalist exit fantasies and i'll be out in 2023
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so um over to you professor slobodian on crack up capitalism thank you yeah thank you so much uh professor hardiman and to the staff at the iea for inviting me and give me a chance to talk
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about some of this material and some of it is related to things i've been publishing over the last year and a half or so and it attempts to sort of get a perspective on this time of
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pandemic and disruption that is maybe a little bit different from one that we usually hear so it's kind of looking at it from the margins and kind of the somewhat radical
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far-right fringes as we'll see in the next 20 minutes or so so i'm happy to hear whatever reactions people have or sort of contributions they might have to this different way of understanding sort of
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the social symptoms of a time of uh social rearrangement now clearly for most of us you know something i think i can speak for myself and probably most of the people on the call the pandemic since
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it took over our lives in march 2020 has been a time of isolation hardship um illness and for many people death loss of relatives
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loss of colleagues and loved ones but for other people of course it's been a time of great economic opportunity and great economic enrichment and one could speak probably you know
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most concretely to the historical surge of the stock market valuations of the last couple of years the unprecedented year-on-year leap in the number of billionaires worldwide the unprecedented returns and bonuses being
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reaped at the hedge funds and the asset managing funds globally those are i think important topics perhaps maybe even more important than what i'm going to talk about today
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but what i'm going to talk about today is something a little bit more um again on the margins is talking about sort of specific individuals who have managed to navigate the kind of waves of fear and
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panic produced by the pandemic to enrich themselves through articulating a kind of a novel form of politics so drawing on the work that i've done as i said over the last year or two i want
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to talk about a few cases of what i think we're sort of provisionally calling or crack up capitalism that is a form of economic activity
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propagated by people whose profit model and their kind of a normative vision of change and the social future relies on an idea of an accelerating process of social dissolution and an accelerating process of political
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fragmentation this is a form of this is sort of a profit model and a kind of a political vision that sees an acceleration in the near future and the medium-term future
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of processes of political crack-up the people i want to look at are first the entrepreneurs of so-called start-up societies who preach secession from existing
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nation-states and the creation of private polities not governed by democracy but simply through contract and private the second group
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we can call catastrophe libertarians of the goldbug community so people who predict a monetary collapse and then sell you the means of fending off your own private tragedy in the form of gold bars
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etfs gold chairs and gold coins and then the third grouper is a group that we've me and my co-author will kallison have called the movement hustlers of the so-called corona skeptic community
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where sort of esoteric entrepreneurs and self-branding tech gurus have managed to turn contrarian opposition to vaccination lockdown and mitigation measures into personal paydays for themselves and i'm
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sure there everyone listening has their own personal version of the the kind of personality that i have in mind when i say that i think all three of these even though
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they can look different in a certain way exemplify a common dynamic which we would do well to keep an eye on that is these investors and business leaders who like war profiteers before them
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know how to capitalize on crisis and also have it in their own interest to kind of give the crisis a nudge too when necessary so even though i mean it's i don't mean to sort of
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make the pandemic a closed story clearly it's still ongoing but i think it's possible already for us to start to sort of historicize it to treat it as something that can be analyzed as the outcome of some sort of longer and short-term developments
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in the recent past and and certain things that are still following us to the present but it is in this sort of funny space right where it's long enough ago now early 2020 that it can feel like it's
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becoming a kind of an an era that we have now spent some time in it's not we're not living in the sort of day-to-day headlines we're starting to see sort of patterns emerging and
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if you remember in the first months those first months of 2020 much of the talk was about the kind of centralization of authority and the centralization of forces there was this
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at least momentary idea that the nations were coming together against what then us president trump called the invisible enemy right so although there was already a kind of a competitive aspect between who would
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have the fewest cases who would have the fewest casualties nonetheless there were sort of this this common perspective of looking towards national leaders assuming that central states were being
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reinforced by the need to deploy supplies to enact rapid uh measures to overrun often private interests or business interests to make sure that people got what they needed
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so there was this kind of centripetal force at first right this tending towards this engine people's eyes were locked on the leaders in crisis mode and central agencies were giving forecasts sending down lockdown measures
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from above you know these figures like anthony faiuchi in the united states every country had their own kind of medical guru who now became the voice of
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either you know reason or oppression depending on your politics um but almost inevitably they were sitting somewhere next to the national leader and we could see a kind of a centripetal
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direction of of of political travel but even then you know even when our eyes were kind of locked on the national leaders there was also a kind of a centrifugal energy right
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which was sometimes a little bit harder to notice but there was an energy a political and social energy that was tending away from the center too think back to that sort of march april may time period
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suddenly local authorities became very prominent right chinese mayors us governors indian chief ministers the uneven spread of the contagion was actually also leading to kind of
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sub-national forms of containment and sub-national sort of patterns of affliction and likely recovery in the united states this was you know
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this was extraordinary this was happening at an extraordinary level the california governor gavin newsom called california a nation-state at one point in the early months of the pandemic
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the washington governor jay inslee accused his own commander-in-chief president donald j trump of fomenting domestic rebellion because trump was talking about quote liberating individual states from uh
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covet containment measures so we saw this this actual dramatic expression of the actual existing federalism of places like the united states and places like india as well
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um in the u.s the maryland governor in another example confessed that he was actually keeping covet tests in an undisclosed location under armed guard to prevent you know washington dc from
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seizing them and redistributing them more evenly across the political landscape the different parts of the u.s broke up into so-called compacts for the purposes of governance and in some cases you know
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differential right of movement so you wouldn't be able to enter the one compact if you had if you had come from certain uh high case states or you had received uh vaccinations and so on place like
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vermont next to massachusetts here kept these policies in place until relatively recently so this is you know amidst the the attempt to sort of tackle as a species
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this existential challenge of the pandemic and the virus it was it was easy to notice or forget sometimes easy to overlook the way that these sort of extraordinary experiments and subnational politics
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were actually underway at the same time these were of course not happening sort of purely spontaneously there were people who were attempting to kind of accelerate this tendency
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and among those were some people who were actually sitting right in the white house so there were a couple of of economic advisors arthur laffer and stephen moore arthur laffer you might know the name
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from the laffer curve um the pseudo-ideological pseudo intellectual justification for the large tax cuts of the early reagan years but also one of trump's closest economic
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advisors um he and his and his co-author and and collaborator stephen moore who works for the um the the think tank alec the american
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legislative executive council which is has it is in his interest to sort of deliver ready-made policy to republican uh congress people to get put into law what they tried to do in the
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course of the pandemic was to sort of set states against each other and to argue that the unwillingness to lift coven measures the unwillingness to roll back containment was going to hurt growth in
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states that made those choices and if it was going to hurt growth then they should not be receiving sort of certain benefits from the center and the laggard anti-growth states of the blue democratic america
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would be sort of disadvantaged against the pro-growth um you know anti-lockdown red states so even as there was this language of the nation pulling itself together and so on
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beyond the kind of forget about the kind of you know the the black lives matter movement and the kind of street protests that were happening through 2020 that we can sometimes too easily forget when the biggest on the street protest movement
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in american history even at this sort of higher level level of policy there was an attempt to set sub-national units against one another in a competition for
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scarce resources and for scarce mobile capital in some cases for example there was a great deal of movement from places like california to lower tax states like nevada
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texas and florida so there's this sort of much valley who texted us from silicon valley to miami as a new hub for especially things like crypto
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so there was a lot of sort of sub-national movement happening and it wasn't happening organically or on its own it was happening because there was an effort to kind of redeploy and
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scramble the the concentrations of wealth and productive resources in the united states so that is you know still i would say within the realm of pretty standard what you would call competitive federalism
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you know i don't i don't think we could call the decision of elon musk to move tesla to texas for the reasons of low taxes sort of a symptom of crack up capitalism because it's more or less business as usual
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the united states especially the auto industry has been um reshuffled over the last half century largely by this logic of tax holidays leveraging public funds to um better
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enrich private companies and to draw them from one place to the other there were more radical examples however and those are the ones that i want to spend the rest of my time here talking about
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one of the most kind of articulate exponents of a more radical form of what we think we could call crack up capitalism is someone who was a phd in electrical engineering from stanford
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formal general partner at um andreas and horowitz which is one of the most important silicon valley venture capital funds it's a fellow named biology cenovasian who
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has a very large social media following he's sort of a celebrity of the the tech uh media world and he was also rather early in predicting the
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um the uh the radical outcome of the the spread of covet 19. so already i think in february he was saying that this thing is coming we need to we need to lock down now we
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need to start putting on mass etc etc um which would be itself perhaps kind of admirable in the sense that he had this kind of foresight to um see the the the sort of direction of
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travel for this epidemiological event but where it becomes more notable is that he saw this as a kind of a chance to accelerate something he had already seen in the making in a while
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which is the kind of breakup of centralized states altogether in a lasting way i.e not just short-term lockdown quarantine to prevent the spread of the virus but he
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actually is a proponent of something called startup societies which suggests the creation of new private polities on quote-unquote virgin land
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somewhere leased or bought from um developing countries in which people could expatriate from the country that they're they're currently living in become citizens of this country and
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enter in a non-democratic form of contract-based uh affiliation so effectively a kind of gated community but as a country altogether so this is
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something that he had been actively helping to promote and advocate for years along with um patrice friedman the grandson of milton friedman
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biology cervasian had been involved with the supporting the so-called seasteading movement and so on and it was very interesting to see in the early pandemic how he anticipated that the the effect
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of coven 19 would be to kind of accelerate what he's what he saw as a kind of a hoped for fragmentation that the effective covid would be to increase the mobility of certain factors of
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production so mobile talent mobile capital would start following the logic of the places that had locked down most effectively would become green zones that would suck in mobile talent capital
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places that had not would experience a kind of a capital flight or a kind of talent flight or a brain drain making states ever more into kind of vendors and entrepreneurs
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of and you know doing everything they can to fashion themselves in a way to draw in the um the this uh important small percentage of the world's population that was able to you know pull up stakes and re-establish
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themselves wherever they want without discomfort so this was of course you know something a vision that has now been complicated by the the difficulties of a zero covet
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policy for example in in china taiwan and new zealand and hong kong but at the time it was it was uh notable at least to me because most of the world you know march april
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may 2020 was still in kind of panic mode um triage mode and notably someone like him was saying this is actually an opportunity and it could be this is this could be the
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chance that we've been waiting for to accelerate a movement into a kind of a post-national um much more kind of uh fractal as he likes to put a
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landscape of options for a kind of larger palette of policy options for the mobile um millionaire and entrepreneur this was picked up on by people who do
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things like rankings for world passports uh you know who predicted that that covid would spark a sort of step shift in global mobility uh increasing the movement of people who wanted to
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secure second passports for the ability to um relocate you know it's it has indeed taken a different color now when for example people are trying to get out of china because they are locking down
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and containing the virus so well so one can see how there's um things have not turned out as this as this group has hoped for but it is notable that they thought that that that the pandemic itself would
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serve as a kind of a rocket fuel towards a a fragmentation process that had in many ways had been happening across what we call the sort of neoliberal era over the last 40 50 years
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another set of of crack up capitalists that i followed a bit in my work and that i that i wanted to say something about is people who are specifically involved as precious metals consultants or in the business of of
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selling gold and gold backed assets in various forms this group of people you know collectively called gold bugs insofar as this is a belief that they have and not
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just a line of work that they happen to be involved in um is a kind of a long-standing strain of libertarianism which is itself quite interesting in that
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it got a big bump after the end of the bretton woods system in the early 1970s when the u.s closed the gold window in other words stopped making the u.s dollar convertible freely to
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gold the price of gold went way up the subculture was produced within which the belief was that paper money fiat money money not backed
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by precious metals was simply a kind of a means of politicians to buy off favors from the electorate that the printing presses so to speak
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would be run forever by these quote unquote socialist politicians to you know buy off poor poor people's votes buy off minority people's votes um
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hand off money to their to their crony capitalist partners within the business community and that the world according to the gold bug since the end of the red and wood system has been the build up of the sort of paper
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mountain of fiat currency which at some point will be set ablaze you know leaving the world in ashes and only people who have left the sort of
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the concrete token of value i.e gold that has been recognized for thousands of years and so on as they say as a store of value only the people left holding gold will be the ones who can sort of
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survive in this ashes of this monetary apocalypse i am not exaggerating in the rhetoric that i'm using this is this is the kind of way they talk about things the 2008 financial crisis
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indeed gave a big push to gold bugs they got some renewed relevance within sort of french communities the internet has provided a wonderful new platform to kind of push this idea that
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things like quantitative easing things like zero interest rate policy are ways for people in power to just keep themselves in power and at the expense of the
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um the long-term effective collapse of the economy and society so when the pandemic hit the gold bugs were kind of um rubbing their hands because it was
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now clear that the the the moment had come the moment they had predicted one place that i followed this specifically although i think you could follow this in most countries the place i looked at it was in germany and in
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2020 there was just this sort of flood of books called things like um the greatest crash of all time how you can still protect your money the world before the greatest economic
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crisis of all time the crash is here what you have to do now exclamation point world system crash the crash is the solution dot dot you know i could go on and on and on and these were not marginal books
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right these were actually best sellers on amazon in germany and they all basically promised the same thing which is if you want to protect yourself and shield yourself from this now
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you know currently occurring collapse in 2020 then you need to as quickly as possible get yourself to the precious metals real retailer that in many cases these authors either consult for or work directly for and you know buy gold
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ingots buy gold bars buy gold coins of course if you tried to do that in early 2020 you would find that they there was such a run on things like golden goods and gold bars that you can
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actually couldn't get your hands on them there were long lines you know when the stores were still open at the gold retailers of a place like de goosa for example in germany and um
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the the uh the effect was you know the sense of desperation for people who felt now that the gold bug uh fearmongering had been confirmed
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and that now one had you know only to sort of cling to the possibility of sort of accessing some of those last remaining those last remaining um wafers or bars or index thing that were still available
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out there often being paid bought at a at a great premium right the gold price did rise by about a third over the course of 2020 that's gone up and down since then but has um remained at a much higher level as it
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was before the pandemic so within the community of gold retailers gold consultants there are some you know properly well-read kind of ideologues one of whom is a fellow named
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marcus crowl who um germans might have heard of if there's any germans in the audience but he was sort of recognized by the far right in germany as the kind of you know the friedrich hayek of their
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movement the alternative for germany the right-wing party which is a close has had a close working relationship with the goldbug community um you know had politicians who were recommending people go to read marcus
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crowl's book watch his youtube um shows which would get hundreds of thousands of views within days of being posted in march april and may of 2020 and
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he is relevant because he matched his vision of of sort of monetary collapse not only with the kind of self-interested project of selling you the only remedy against the crisis which
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he predicted was coming but also a kind of elaborated political worldview as well so most notably he suggested that there needed to be what he called the bourgeois revolution
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within which again most notably if you received any sort of a state support you know a pension if you were poor or disabled and you received some sort of bursary or
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subsidies from the government if you were civil servant if you were a student on a government scholarship you forfeited the right to vote so democracy should only be a right of
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people who um have endured the any kind of a state dependency as he called them i mean you know anyone who's spent 10 minutes in a political economy class knows that
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anyone who's an entrepreneur is profiting in all kinds of interact ways from state spending but the the ideology was this that there's a kind of fifty percent of the population makers takers etc who are parasitic on the
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state and therefore have no right to participate in the democracy and this is a strong strain within far-right discussions in in germany in austria and switzerland often overlooked
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in a discussion of sort of populism which suggests the kind of welfare chauvinism along the lines more of what marine le pen just ran on in france but in the german-speaking countries far-right movements
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tend much more towards this kind of a thing a kind of anti-poor anti-democratic um anti-fiat money and often a kind of a kind of a very austere
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uh fiscal like hyper fisker fiscal disa discipline model rather than a kind of uh reversion to a more generous social state so i'm running low on time those are my so those are my first two crack up
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capitalists the kind of startup society entrepreneurs the gold bugs predicting you know imminent collapse the third group i'll just mention briefly is the the corona skeptic movement
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in germany you know the place that i in a way know best or that i that my training is in the the corona skeptic movement was led by something called the fedenka
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which can be translated as kind of diagonal thinkers or sort of thinking outside of the box and they're often depicted in the media as a kind of spontaneous reaction against the against the
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lockdown measures i mean depicted very unflatteringly in the media but depicted as a kind of you know a grassroots something like the giles jean of the of the the coronavirus moment people um
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spontaneously expressing their discontent for what were often described as you know erroneous or misguided reasons but missed often in the reportage and i would say this is true of most of the
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ways the kind of coveted skeptic anti-lockdown movements have been narrated or reported is there's often there's missing these sort of these hinge figures who we
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me and my co-author will call us and call movement hustlers or you could just call sort of ideological entrepreneurs policy entrepreneurs people who kind of organize that ambient discontent you know bundle it give it some kind of
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a give it some kind of a shape and then often you know are critical in making it not only more effective but also in producing its own momentum in the case of this the
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german movement this movement which is a term that is very much like a kind of uh early 2000s sort of tech term right in that sense it's very much like
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thinking out of the box it's something you might see on a powerpoint slide or on a kind of like a low energy kind of piece of pr for uh for uh you know recruitment
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firm so the person who sort of coined the term and attached it to opposition to the chronovirus measures was himself an i.t developer an entrepreneur
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had had a bunch of startups to his name within stuttgart which if you don't know germany is one of the richest parts of germany and copyrighted the term fair dank in 2020
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and in the course of 2020 as he was you know organizing this grassroots discontent was taking monetary contributions directly by paypal or bank transfer to his account and was legally describing fedex as an
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initiative rather than a foundation so he could avoid taxes on the donations so this can be replicated from country to country the people who are it's not to say that
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they don't believe in it themselves they could very well have um profound convictions about the the dangers of the vaccine or the the long-term psychological harm to children that lockdowns and masks and
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masking has performed it's not to question that that people believe this or even in some cases that there is some legitimate foundation to their concern but that the people who are the middle middlemen and middle women
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are often have a vested interest in in pushing this towards ever less conciliatory or ever less sort of compromised capable forms of opposition and i think
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that that form of kind of crack up capitalism really thrives on the internet it thrives in the kind of silos of of social media it thrives in the sort of you know paid webinars and paid sub
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stacks and newsletters that induce people entrepreneurially to incite more emotional response um
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as the last kind of hit sort of phase right so the the radicalizing tendencies of social movements are well known have been studied for for decades but i think the kind of augmentation of
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social media platforms onto social movements um is something that has a a sort of a combustible quality that is often not lasting
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is often not sustainable but it can produce these sort of pyrotechnic moments that um are also very profitable for those people who manage to kind of capture capture the the energy and the more
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importantly the funds and um skim off their fair share in the process so i think that it's probably a good place to leave it there so leave us some time to some time to chat but i wanted
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to just give a kind of a a little bit of an insight into what i think is the the the palette or the tableau of some of the more the more extreme forms of political morbid symptoms that we're seeing in our
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our present tumultuous moment so thank you [Music]
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