In the conjuncture of ‚Antinomies’—this was as true of Hobsbawm or Gerratana as of myself—we were writing of a different era: a time when there had recently been the largest mass strike in history in France, the overthrow of a government by workers in Britain, continuous outbreaks of revolt in Italy, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, and a revolution in Portugal, where hopes and fears of a social upheaval, galvanizing Washington and Bonn to vigilance, were still fresh. It was the last hour of what Lukács, in his tribute to Lenin in 1923, had called the actuality of the revolution. Portugal features both in ‚Antinomies‘ and in Hobsbawm’s rejoinders to it.

—Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, October 2016 preface, (London: Verso, 2020), 25.

Ein Blick in die Berufsstatistik eines konfessionell gemischten Landes pflegt mit auffallender Häufigkeit eine Erscheinung zu zeigen, welche mehrfach in der katholischen Presse und Literatur und auf den Katholikentagen Deutschlands lebhaft erörtert worden ist: den ganz vorwiegend protestantischen Charakter des Kapitalbesitzes und Unternehmertums sowohl, wie der oberen gelernten Schichten der Arbeiterschaft, namentlich aber des höheren technisch oder kaufmännisch vorgebildeten Personals der modernen Unternehmungen. Nicht nur da, wo die Differenz der Konfession mit einem Unterschied der Nationalität und damit des Grades der Kultur­entwicklung zusammenfällt, wie im deutschen Osten zwischen Deutschen und Polen, sondern fast überall da, wo überhaupt die kapitalistische Entwicklung in der Zeit ihres Aufblühens freie Hand hatte, die Bevölkerung nach ihren Bedürfnissen sozial umzuschichten und beruflich zu gliedern, — und je mehr dies der Fall war, desto deutlicher, — finden wir jene Erscheinung in den Zahlen der Konfessionsstatistik ausgeprägt.

—Max Weber, »Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus«, (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2004), 65.

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Absent some new realignment, we face an unsettled terrain with no broadly legitimate hegemonic ruling bloc—nor any clear and credible counterhegemonic challenger. In this situation, the most likely near-term scenario is a series of pendulum swings, with governments oscillating back and forth between the frankly neoliberal (progressive or regressive, diversity-friendly or exclusionary, liberal-democratic or proto-fascist) and the professedly anti-neoliberal (left- or right-populist or social-democratic or communitarian), the precise mix to be determined in every case by national specificities.

Such political oscillations mark the present as an interregnum: a time when, in the words of Antonio Gramsci, „the old is dying and the new cannot be born.“ The duration of this interregnum is anyone’s guess, as is the likelihood of its devolution into full-bore authoritarianism, major war, or catastrophic meltdown—as opposed to „mere“ slow unraveling. One way or another, the system’s impasses will continue to grind away at our ways of life, until such time as a credible counterhegemonic bloc can be assembled. Until then, we will live (and die) amid the vast array of „morbid symptoms“ that mark the death throes of financialized capitalism, and the general crisis it has wrought.

Whatever happens, this much is clear: crises like this one do not come along every day.

—Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, (London: Verso, 2022), 136-137.

Generally, financialized capitalism is the era of „governance without government“—which is to say, that of domination without the fig leaf of consent. In this regime, it is not states but transnational governance structures such as the European Union, World Trade Organization, NAFTA, and TRIPS that make the lion’s share of the coercively enforceable rules that now govern vast swaths of social interaction throughout the world. Accountable to no one and acting overwhelmingly in the interest of capital, these bodies are „constitutionalizing“ neoliberal notions of „free trade“ and „intellectual property,“ hard-wiring them into the global regime, and preempting democratic labor and environmental legislation in advance. Through a variety of means, finally, this regime has promoted the capture of public power by private (corporate) power, while also colonizing the former internally, modeling its modus operandi on that of private firms.

The overall effect has been to hollow out public power at every level.

—Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, (London: Verso, 2022), 130.

Essential to its functioning, public power is part and parcel of the institutionalized societal order that is capitalism.

Nevertheless, the maintenance of political power stands in tense relation with the imperative of capital accumulation. The reason lies in capitalism’s distinctive institutional topography, which separates „the economic“ from „the political.“ In this respect, capitalist societies differ from earlier forms, in which those instances were effectively fused—as, for example, in feudal society, where control over labor, land, and military force was vested in the single institution of lordship and vassalage. In capitalist society, by contrast, economic power and political power are split apart; each is assigned its own sphere, endowed with its own distinctive medium and modus operandi. The power to organize production is privatized and devolved to capital, which is supposed to deploy only the „natural,“ „nonpolitical“ sanctions of hunger and need. The task of governing „non-economic“ orders, including those that supply the external conditions for accumulation, falls to the public power, which alone may utilize the „political“ media of law and „legitimate“ state violence. In capitalism, therefore, the economic is nonpolitical, and the political is non-economic.

Constitutive of capitalism as an institutionalized societal order, this separation severely limits the scope of the political within that order. Devolving vast aspects of social life to the rule of „the market“ (in reality, to large corporations), it declares them off limits to democratic decision making, collective action, and public control. The arrangement deprives us of the ability to decide collectively what and how much we want to produce, on what energic basis and through what kinds of social relations. It deprives us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce; how we want to relate to nature and to future generations; how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. By virtue of its inherent structure, then, capitalism is fundamentally anti-democratic. Even in the best-case scenario, democracy in a capitalist society must perforce be limited and weak.

—Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, (London: Verso, 2022), 121-122.

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