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The decline of the nation state
Neoliberalism, which set out to plunder the world in the 1980s with the maxim “Profit over People” and its political figureheads Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, distorted almost all areas relevant to social coexistence beyond recognition. After the “victory” over the communist East, there was no stopping it. Financial capital spread like a cancer.
The decline of the nation state
Social and economic centrifugal forces are tearing apart the old social order. However, new hope can arise from the ruins of the old.
The creative destruction of things, of thought and of living beings permeates the cultural, social and political spheres of subjects chained to capital as an economic formula for constant renewal. They are still bundled together as a society in the state. This organizational structure, which no longer meets the requirements of profit maximization in the 21st century, is being replaced by a network of regions. In their centers, between emptiness and meaninglessness, the decay of conventional values and orders is proliferating. However, a new joy in utopia could emerge from it.
by Gunther Sosna
[This article posted on 9/14/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/der-verfall-der-staaten.]
Neoliberalism, which set out to plunder the world in the 1980s with the maxim “Profit over People” (1) and its political figureheads Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, distorted almost all areas relevant to social coexistence beyond recognition. After the “victory” over the communist East, there was no stopping it. Financial capital spread like a cancer. Wherever it sets its foot, scorched earth remains. Europe became the prey (2).
The shadow of the crisis
The organizational superstructure was adapted by the system-compliant parties and their career-conscious functionaries to the needs of the “free market economy”, which is subsidized by the state. Education, health care, infrastructure, food, drinking water and housing, to name just a few areas, were thrown to the wolves of capital. Countries such as Portugal, Spain, Greece and the United Kingdom, where the financial capital of the City of London has its living room, have been run down and the future of entire generations sacrificed for profit.
In the slipstream of the financial crisis from 2007 and the euro crisis from 2010, labor rights were curtailed, social standards swept away and widespread privatizations carried out. The often-mentioned accompanying decline of democracy in the European Union, accompanied, among other things, by new police and surveillance laws, was, strictly speaking, only the confirmation that there can be no popular sovereignty in a system of rule in which power emanates from capital.
The system is corroding and drifting apart. There are plenty of signs of social decline in Central Europe.
These include the increase in drug use and mental illness, the growing old-age poverty, youth unemployment, the omnipresent narcissism, the accentuation of sexual identity, the intellectual uniformity in art, teaching and research, the almost unstoppable kakistocracy in parliaments and institutions, the suspension of cultural or ethnic homogeneity and the joyful militarization of public space.
This list includes the segmentation of labor into mini- and part-time jobs, digital activities without real added value, the forced spatial flexibility of wage laborers, the cost-effective outsourcing of administrative and screen work to the “home office” for companies, the economic focus on services, renting instead of buying, service for everything, care for everyone, and so on.
The degenerative erosion of states is reflected, among other things, in the transfer of political and economic decisions to supranational entities, the hypermobility of capital, the infantilization of the political, and the influence of globally operating asset managers and monopolies, whose power is growing inexorably through deregulation and privatization.
The deathblow
The densification of the population in urban centers, as well as the networking of metropolises through high-speed connections, the infrastructural expression of a compression that causes the periphery to die, is dealing the deathblow to the states. Illusions of community and nation, which should have vanished at the latest by the events in the prescribed pandemic, still hold these aging organizational units together. Their liquidation, which takes place via the intermediate station of the repressive state, is an appearance in the economic evolutionary process that transforms financial capitalism into digital feudalism.
In the digital revolution, the very basis of capitalism is irreversibly destroyed. The displacement of working people from production by automation, robotics and artificial intelligence destroys the overall cycle of capital and leads to unprecedented pauperization.
The ruling class, which owes its wealth to the sophisticated system of private property, wage labor, debt, rents, leases and interest, no longer needs culture, morals, religion or nation, which is already being exploited. Instead, it needs war as a profit machine, the sick, addicts and huge prisons to prepare for the inevitable confrontation with the redundant productive forces. The state is a means to an end.
Paternalism and a creeping escalation of surveillance, sold to the population as a measure for their “security”, are transforming the reality of urbanized people's lives into a colorful panopticon flooded with fear, with invisible walls and heavily armed guards. In the wasteland of this transparent tristesse, with its 24-hour surveillance, existential emptiness and colorful futility of consumerism, overfeeding and self-optimization, anomie blossoms.
Words of a Rebel
The present would be incomplete without historical parallels. In the 19th century, European societies were restructured in line with the needs of the industrial revolution and thus in the sense of the capitalist dictatorship of the professional. Agriculture, which had previously been dominant, receded into the background. Trade, industry and finance determined the economic cycles. After the collapse of the financial markets in 1873, which was accompanied by numerous bank insolvencies until the late 1890s, most industrialized countries experienced rapidly changing periods of economic ups and downs. This period became known as the “Great Depression”.
The Russian pioneer of communist anarchism, Peter A. Kropotkin (1842–1921), who countered the Social Darwinist concept of the struggle for existence as the driving force of evolution with the concept of mutual aid, which was at least as effective in promoting evolution , formulated his observations on the state and decline of European states in his book “Paroles d'un révolté” (3) during the phase of high industrialization towards the end of the 19th century. Kropotkin's conclusions can be superimposed like a template over current conditions.
"If the economic situation in Europe can be summed up in the words: industrial and commercial chaos and bankruptcy of capitalist production, then the political situation can be characterized by the words: rapid decline and imminent bankruptcy of the states. Let us survey them all, and we will not find one that is not moving at an accelerated pace towards dissolution and, consequently, revolution. (…) An incurable disease consumes them all: old age, decline. The state, this organization in which the general care of all the affairs of all people is left in the hands of a few people, this form of human organization has outlived itself. Humanity is already working out new forms of association."
The phases of slowing growth naturally hit the working class hardest. From the experiences of impoverishment that accompanied industrialization, the clarity established itself in the consciousness of the proletariat that the economic conditions and the rule of the capitalists are intolerable. The strike became an important tool in the class struggle to enforce social demands against the exploiters, and culminated in uprisings and revolts.
Even if Kropotkin's assessments are not transferable to today's pacifist-oriented societies and the conditions of the “fourth industrial revolution”, they still have a tendency towards systemic validity. Societies follow technological developments and economically required adjustments much faster than a state with its outdated hierarchical structures and its party-politically occupied institutions can. As a rigid structure, the state compensates for its already persistent backlog, which is dramatically increasing in the digital era, by emphasizing its structural contours of national demarcation and external aggressiveness on the one hand and internal repression, paternalism and control of the population on the other.
What is announced
This approach of throwing a spanner in the works of rapidly progressing change does not correspond at all with the demands that the global and fluid digital society places on creativity, flexibility and reaction speed. It leads to a paralysis of all dynamics, suffocates necessary cooperation and seduces into agony. This favors decay.
The flight into surveillance and ever-increasing “security”, which provides no answer to the current and future geopolitical and socio-economic turmoil, can be interpreted as a fear of loss of control, which underlines the alienation of society and the state.
The state cannot – in whatever form – do without society in order to exist, while societies can exist without a state.
The visionaries who pursue the utopia of a social order that knows no rulers and the ruled separate their thinking and acting from the comforts and temporal dimensions of months, years and their own life expectancy that they have grown fond of. They know that, as pioneers, they can divine the goal but will not reach it. That does not matter; the generations that find the traces of utopia will realize it – these must be clearly enough in the sand of history.
The motivation for this is given by the global situation and the wars that are on the doorstep. Understanding economic conditions as an iceberg and the states as a leaking Titanic requires little imagination, but the composure of the uninvolved observer. Hand on heart: Who likes to sail the stormy seas of capital with their financial sharks, wealth monsters and monopoly monsters? The story of unsinkability is a myth. The ship has huge holes in its social, economic and political hull. The moral engine room has been under water since the launch. The ship is sinking. Not today, not tomorrow. It will take some time. The sinking will probably drag on for decades. Then it will happen very quickly. Kropotkin summarized the final turning point in one sentence, which reflects his sense of the extensive change that began to spread across much of Europe in the 20th century:
“The people, who are the power, will triumph over their oppressors; the overthrow of the states is only a relatively short-term issue in our history, and the calmest philosopher sees the promise of a great revolution on the horizon.”
Sources and notes:
(1) Noam Chomsky (1999): Profit over People – Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press, New York, Toronto, London. Available as PDF at , accessed August 25, 2024.
(2) Neue Debatte (2017): A film everyone should see: “Europe – A Continent as Booty”. Available from web archive at , accessed August 30, 2024.
(3) Peter A. Kropotkin (1885): The Decay of States. Taken from: “Worte eines Rebellen”, rowohlt 1972, pages 16 to 19. French original title: “La décomposition des États”. Published in the work “Paroles d'un révolté”. Available on , accessed August 30, 2024.
Gunther Sosna studied psychology, sociology and sports science and worked in advertising, communication and as a journalist, among other things. He is concerned with the possibilities and limits of grassroots and informal organization. He is the initiator of Neue Debatte – Magazin für Journalismus und Wissenschaft von unten.
Read more
Thematically related article
Social terror
Acts of violence and reports about them only serve to briefly increase the general level of agitation, thus causing a deadening effect.
10.08.2024 by Gunther Sosna
Current article
Last exit negotiations
From the archive
Everything is upside down
Social and economic centrifugal forces are tearing apart the old social order. However, new hope can arise from the ruins of the old.
The creative destruction of things, of thought and of living beings permeates the cultural, social and political spheres of subjects chained to capital as an economic formula for constant renewal. They are still bundled together as a society in the state. This organizational structure, which no longer meets the requirements of profit maximization in the 21st century, is being replaced by a network of regions. In their centers, between emptiness and meaninglessness, the decay of conventional values and orders is proliferating. However, a new joy in utopia could emerge from it.
by Gunther Sosna
[This article posted on 9/14/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/der-verfall-der-staaten.]
Neoliberalism, which set out to plunder the world in the 1980s with the maxim “Profit over People” (1) and its political figureheads Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, distorted almost all areas relevant to social coexistence beyond recognition. After the “victory” over the communist East, there was no stopping it. Financial capital spread like a cancer. Wherever it sets its foot, scorched earth remains. Europe became the prey (2).
The shadow of the crisis
The organizational superstructure was adapted by the system-compliant parties and their career-conscious functionaries to the needs of the “free market economy”, which is subsidized by the state. Education, health care, infrastructure, food, drinking water and housing, to name just a few areas, were thrown to the wolves of capital. Countries such as Portugal, Spain, Greece and the United Kingdom, where the financial capital of the City of London has its living room, have been run down and the future of entire generations sacrificed for profit.
In the slipstream of the financial crisis from 2007 and the euro crisis from 2010, labor rights were curtailed, social standards swept away and widespread privatizations carried out. The often-mentioned accompanying decline of democracy in the European Union, accompanied, among other things, by new police and surveillance laws, was, strictly speaking, only the confirmation that there can be no popular sovereignty in a system of rule in which power emanates from capital.
The system is corroding and drifting apart. There are plenty of signs of social decline in Central Europe.
These include the increase in drug use and mental illness, the growing old-age poverty, youth unemployment, the omnipresent narcissism, the accentuation of sexual identity, the intellectual uniformity in art, teaching and research, the almost unstoppable kakistocracy in parliaments and institutions, the suspension of cultural or ethnic homogeneity and the joyful militarization of public space.
This list includes the segmentation of labor into mini- and part-time jobs, digital activities without real added value, the forced spatial flexibility of wage laborers, the cost-effective outsourcing of administrative and screen work to the “home office” for companies, the economic focus on services, renting instead of buying, service for everything, care for everyone, and so on.
The degenerative erosion of states is reflected, among other things, in the transfer of political and economic decisions to supranational entities, the hypermobility of capital, the infantilization of the political, and the influence of globally operating asset managers and monopolies, whose power is growing inexorably through deregulation and privatization.
The deathblow
The densification of the population in urban centers, as well as the networking of metropolises through high-speed connections, the infrastructural expression of a compression that causes the periphery to die, is dealing the deathblow to the states. Illusions of community and nation, which should have vanished at the latest by the events in the prescribed pandemic, still hold these aging organizational units together. Their liquidation, which takes place via the intermediate station of the repressive state, is an appearance in the economic evolutionary process that transforms financial capitalism into digital feudalism.
In the digital revolution, the very basis of capitalism is irreversibly destroyed. The displacement of working people from production by automation, robotics and artificial intelligence destroys the overall cycle of capital and leads to unprecedented pauperization.
The ruling class, which owes its wealth to the sophisticated system of private property, wage labor, debt, rents, leases and interest, no longer needs culture, morals, religion or nation, which is already being exploited. Instead, it needs war as a profit machine, the sick, addicts and huge prisons to prepare for the inevitable confrontation with the redundant productive forces. The state is a means to an end.
Paternalism and a creeping escalation of surveillance, sold to the population as a measure for their “security”, are transforming the reality of urbanized people's lives into a colorful panopticon flooded with fear, with invisible walls and heavily armed guards. In the wasteland of this transparent tristesse, with its 24-hour surveillance, existential emptiness and colorful futility of consumerism, overfeeding and self-optimization, anomie blossoms.
Words of a Rebel
The present would be incomplete without historical parallels. In the 19th century, European societies were restructured in line with the needs of the industrial revolution and thus in the sense of the capitalist dictatorship of the professional. Agriculture, which had previously been dominant, receded into the background. Trade, industry and finance determined the economic cycles. After the collapse of the financial markets in 1873, which was accompanied by numerous bank insolvencies until the late 1890s, most industrialized countries experienced rapidly changing periods of economic ups and downs. This period became known as the “Great Depression”.
The Russian pioneer of communist anarchism, Peter A. Kropotkin (1842–1921), who countered the Social Darwinist concept of the struggle for existence as the driving force of evolution with the concept of mutual aid, which was at least as effective in promoting evolution , formulated his observations on the state and decline of European states in his book “Paroles d'un révolté” (3) during the phase of high industrialization towards the end of the 19th century. Kropotkin's conclusions can be superimposed like a template over current conditions.
"If the economic situation in Europe can be summed up in the words: industrial and commercial chaos and bankruptcy of capitalist production, then the political situation can be characterized by the words: rapid decline and imminent bankruptcy of the states. Let us survey them all, and we will not find one that is not moving at an accelerated pace towards dissolution and, consequently, revolution. (…) An incurable disease consumes them all: old age, decline. The state, this organization in which the general care of all the affairs of all people is left in the hands of a few people, this form of human organization has outlived itself. Humanity is already working out new forms of association."
The phases of slowing growth naturally hit the working class hardest. From the experiences of impoverishment that accompanied industrialization, the clarity established itself in the consciousness of the proletariat that the economic conditions and the rule of the capitalists are intolerable. The strike became an important tool in the class struggle to enforce social demands against the exploiters, and culminated in uprisings and revolts.
Even if Kropotkin's assessments are not transferable to today's pacifist-oriented societies and the conditions of the “fourth industrial revolution”, they still have a tendency towards systemic validity. Societies follow technological developments and economically required adjustments much faster than a state with its outdated hierarchical structures and its party-politically occupied institutions can. As a rigid structure, the state compensates for its already persistent backlog, which is dramatically increasing in the digital era, by emphasizing its structural contours of national demarcation and external aggressiveness on the one hand and internal repression, paternalism and control of the population on the other.
What is announced
This approach of throwing a spanner in the works of rapidly progressing change does not correspond at all with the demands that the global and fluid digital society places on creativity, flexibility and reaction speed. It leads to a paralysis of all dynamics, suffocates necessary cooperation and seduces into agony. This favors decay.
The flight into surveillance and ever-increasing “security”, which provides no answer to the current and future geopolitical and socio-economic turmoil, can be interpreted as a fear of loss of control, which underlines the alienation of society and the state.
The state cannot – in whatever form – do without society in order to exist, while societies can exist without a state.
The visionaries who pursue the utopia of a social order that knows no rulers and the ruled separate their thinking and acting from the comforts and temporal dimensions of months, years and their own life expectancy that they have grown fond of. They know that, as pioneers, they can divine the goal but will not reach it. That does not matter; the generations that find the traces of utopia will realize it – these must be clearly enough in the sand of history.
The motivation for this is given by the global situation and the wars that are on the doorstep. Understanding economic conditions as an iceberg and the states as a leaking Titanic requires little imagination, but the composure of the uninvolved observer. Hand on heart: Who likes to sail the stormy seas of capital with their financial sharks, wealth monsters and monopoly monsters? The story of unsinkability is a myth. The ship has huge holes in its social, economic and political hull. The moral engine room has been under water since the launch. The ship is sinking. Not today, not tomorrow. It will take some time. The sinking will probably drag on for decades. Then it will happen very quickly. Kropotkin summarized the final turning point in one sentence, which reflects his sense of the extensive change that began to spread across much of Europe in the 20th century:
“The people, who are the power, will triumph over their oppressors; the overthrow of the states is only a relatively short-term issue in our history, and the calmest philosopher sees the promise of a great revolution on the horizon.”
Sources and notes:
(1) Noam Chomsky (1999): Profit over People – Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press, New York, Toronto, London. Available as PDF at , accessed August 25, 2024.
(2) Neue Debatte (2017): A film everyone should see: “Europe – A Continent as Booty”. Available from web archive at , accessed August 30, 2024.
(3) Peter A. Kropotkin (1885): The Decay of States. Taken from: “Worte eines Rebellen”, rowohlt 1972, pages 16 to 19. French original title: “La décomposition des États”. Published in the work “Paroles d'un révolté”. Available on , accessed August 30, 2024.
Gunther Sosna studied psychology, sociology and sports science and worked in advertising, communication and as a journalist, among other things. He is concerned with the possibilities and limits of grassroots and informal organization. He is the initiator of Neue Debatte – Magazin für Journalismus und Wissenschaft von unten.
Read more
Thematically related article
Social terror
Acts of violence and reports about them only serve to briefly increase the general level of agitation, thus causing a deadening effect.
10.08.2024 by Gunther Sosna
Current article
Last exit negotiations
From the archive
Everything is upside down
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What can we do about the problems this situation causes for humanity?
I think the political parties are the best target.
C. Wright Mills refused to vote, because he the "two party system" is extra constitutional and undermines democracy. He is the author of "The Power Elite". Updates of his line of thinking can be found in the works of Bill Domhoff, who is very old, but still alive in Santa Cruz. He's now doing dream research, but his early works do relate to Mills.
I just wanted to suggest this in case someone is interested