US Politics

“There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

These words by Italian novelist Italo Calvino capture one of the most important superstructural elements in geopolitics, a phenomenon whose study was pioneered by Simon Fraser University’s Paul Dutton in his study of Charlemagne’s Empire, the first Holy Roman Empire: consciousness of decline.

Like all the truly great academics with whom I have studied (a small but not insignificant subset of the great intellectuals I have known), Dutton came to a profound knowledge of the whole world by studying one thing therein comprehensively. Dutton argued that while the Carolingian Empire, which lasted for only five generations, between 768 and 889 CE, was always a dodgy prospect from an economic and logistical perspective, a key factor in its decline was essentially immaterial (my fellow Marxists would likely distinguish it as superstructural but let’s not split that hair here).

Dutton’s argument was that Carolingian courtiers and aristocrats, especially after Charlemagne’s coronation as the first Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 CE, were intellectually shaped by an emergent historiography that sought to explain the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire between 395 and 554 CE. This caused an excessive vigilance in looking for signs of an incipient decline and fall in their present. What might be viewed as a setback or interregnum within a Chinese imperial historiography, which chronicles multiple periods of fragmentation followed by consolidation, was viewed, in the Carolingian world, as a harbinger of the end.

Dutton began his career with a doctoral dissertation on the role of dreams in the Carolingian court. One such dream of ultimate decline was the subject of an early essay of mine on the nature of hope. The apocryphal dream of Charlemagne was a descriptive composition written at the end of the empire and then backdated and retrojected to the year 813. The dream lives on today in literary form, forming the basis of JRR Tolkien’s “four ages” schema which structured Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion.

But this apocryphal dream was one of many dreams, both apocryphal and real, that visited Carolingian courtiers and seemed to forebode the empire’s inevitable decline and fall. The Vision of Charlemagne (the name of the document in question), narrated imperial fragmentation as unidirectional and cherry-picked political events to do so. It depicted only centrifugal forces, when the Carolingian realms were divided, never centripetal ones, when kingdoms were consolidated and division undone.

Consciousness of decline, by conditioning political decisions with a sense of hopelessness and desperation, is not merely able to accelerate and intensify a material decline; it can, in my view, by itself, cause decline in the face of mere setbacks and the anxiety those setbacks produce. And the desperation caused by consciousness of decline is as or more likely to result in a state overplaying its hand, to prevent a temporary loss as it is to produce resignation and apathy. Usually, societies experiencing consciousness of decline will alternate between the two, following acts of grandiose risk-taking with periods of apathy and despair.

One society, so gripped, was the early twentieth century German Empire, a society overlapping and aspiring to the same territorial boundaries as the Carolingian Empire a thousand years before. That society had an eloquent spokesman for this consciousness, the highly influential authoritarian vitalist intellectual, Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (1918). Spengler’s argument was that the Western civilization had reached the stage that the Roman civilization had reached at the beginning of the civil war between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar that brought about the fall of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire.

Spengler argued, in the binaristic, catastrophist thinking emblematic of consciousness of decline, that because the West was on the same trajectory of Rome and proceeding down the same path, there was only one thing that could delay or perhaps even arrest its fall: the end of democracy and the rise of a charismatic Caesar-like authoritarian militarist leader who would institute “Caesarism.” Needless to say, Spengler’s beliefs conditioned the Nazi movement, not just indirectly through Mein Kampf, which it helped to inspire; it was a popular book among the intellectuals of German authoritarianism, inside and outside the Nazi Party.

Ultimately, the pessimistic desperation we associate with consciousness of decline, we can see in German society thereafter as both the Communists and Nazis saw the libertinism of the Weimar Republic as the equivalent of the putative “decadence” of the late Roman Republic. That desperation, the need to immediately stop the decline, cauterize the supposed wound did not just affect German election outcomes and street battles; it conditioned Hitler’s military strategy, especially in the later years of the war when periods of desperate brinksmanship were followed by abject despair and resignation, culminating in the wanton destruction of infrastructure and murder of civilian populations and then, finally, the murder-suicides of the Nazi leadership.

Ultimately, two material victors of the Second World War were states that, for all their flaws, lacked this consciousness of decline in the generation following the war. The USSR and USA did not begin to experience consciousness of decline until the 1970s and, whatever its profound flaws, the Reagan presidency was successful in dispelling this consciousness at least for a while.

It was not until the American victory over their Soviet rivals that consciousness of decline began creeping into America’s imperial court on a long-term basis. At the same time as the Third Way began downwardly adjusting the material and social expectations of America’s middle and working classes, a debate erupted between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington on the pages of the prestigious American conservative imperialist journal, Foreign Policy, published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Following the fall of the USSR and Warsaw Pact in 1991, Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that Pax Americana was now global and permanent, that free market capitalism and Jeffersonian democracy had won the day and constituted the final phase in human evolution. But just as Spengler was no doubt reacting against Georg Hegel, who had made the same argument about the German state, and on whose thinking Fukuyama had based his book, Fukuyama’s claims elicited a neo-Spenglerian response.

Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations argued that, contrary to Fukuyama’s theory, the world was about to become more divided and enter a period of multi-polar conflict among fundamentally different and irreconcilable “civilizations” and that America had but a short period of time before it became heir to the long undoing of the enemy sovereigns who had submitted to them.

Soon, Huntington predicted, America would be beset on all sides by civilizations with fundamentally different values, that would grow stronger, demographically and economically and soon outpace America and its vassals. The Chinese, Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, Japanese, Indian: these civilizations could soon become existential threats to America. To survive, Huntington argued, America would need to retrench; it would need to consolidate its military resources in its core territory and vassal states, reinvigorate American industrial and energy production, fight strategic wars at its margins to slow the loss of territory, especially its loss to Muslim civilization. It would also need to retrench socially by reducing liberal pluralism, a key source of its weakness, and rediscover its identity as a Christian civilization.

Huntington included some case studies in his work. Whatever one may think of the man’s values, the predictive power of his model is evident as the histories of Turkey and Ukraine continue to unfold as he predicted three decades ago. But it is not events in Black Sea states that ultimately made Huntington’s thinking hegemonic among American foreign policy thinkers. It was, of course, the events of September 11^th, 2001.

Whether it is the Trump movement’s focus on internal reindustrialization and energy extraction or the Democratic Party’s and Bush Administration’s proxy wars and military coups in the imperial periphery, America’s elite decision-makers are all gripped with consciousness of decline, of the neo-Spenglerian vision of Samuel Huntington, alternating between episodes of brinksmanship and shows of power and wallowing in self-indulgent despair and decadence.

Consciousness of decline is something that afflicts an empire, a civilization and its imperial culture. So naturally, this consciousness does not recognize the Great Lakes or forty-ninth parallel as any kind of barrier when it comes to America’s crankiest toady, Canada. The Canada-US border has been no barrier to the spread of this consciousness of decline, but that does not mean Canadian decline consciousness lacks a specifically Canadian inflection.

The long-term alliance between elites in the Liberal Party of Canada and in the Communist Party of China, dating back to Pierre Trudeau’s pilgrimages to the tomb of Norman Bethune means that Canadian decline consciousness is as likely to show up as supplication to Chinese power as it is to bellicosity in Ukraine.

Canada’s elites vacillate between desperately toadying to the rising power of China and the declining power of the US. Our country, which has never existed as anything other than a vassal state to one empire or another, now behaves towards the world’s great powers, be they India, China or the US, like a strapster, one of those small yappy dogs that runs up to you and decides, seemingly at random, to either bite, lick or urinate on you.

Certain that they cannot actually improve the lot of Canadians and that our country is in decline, Canadian political debate has been reduced to a blame game. We are a post-political state whose leaders, rather than trying to solve problems, either insist that the problems do not exist and that the people pointing them out are ungrateful liars or explain that the problem were caused by the other team who must now be punished for screwing things up.

So, although Canada is wealthier, more powerful and has the resources to turn things around, I am exiting North American society because it has become consumed by a consciousness of decline, because societies that believe they are in decline are scary, depressing and unpredictable places to live.

East Germany Rebrands as the Freest State in the East

When Erich Honecker assumed power in East Germany in 1971, he sought to remake the image of his brutal dictatorship in the minds both of its citizens and of the West, to achieve hitherto-elusive diplomatic recognition among members of the NATO alliance and to emerge as the most successful Soviet vassal state in the Warsaw Pact.

This plan contained two central elements, both innovative within the Soviet bloc. The first was to use a highly effective strategy for economic development that had not previous been attempted in a planned economy:

• Import substitution industrialization, an economic development model most thoroughly explained and propounded by revisionists like Andre Gunder Frank and the other “dependency theorists,” that had been most successful in Cold War Turkey and Brazil; and
• Developing less violently coercive and more “inclusive” means of suppressing dissent and maintaining political and social control over the population so that the unanimous elections and staged applause of the regime would be seen less as a show of power and more as a show of popularity

While the latter could not have been successful in persuading the West of the regime’s exemplary character without the former also succeeding, this piece will concentrate exclusively on the second element: social control.

The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, were already among the most feared of the secret police forces of the Warsaw Pact and their playbook was largely that developed by the KGB, the USSR’s secret police, during Joseph Stalin’s purges of the 1920s and 30s. Show trials were used not to convince the public of dissidents’ guilt but to demonstrate the power of the state to rig its own judicial system and turn every verdict into a foregone conclusion. Torture, similarly, was widely practiced and efforts at denying it were transparent and perfunctory because the point was to make torture a public secret, an unacknowledged fact that nevertheless shaped everyone’s expectations of what happened if they stepped out of line. Knowledge of torture was as universal as its formulaic denial. The odd street beating was thrown in as well, so that the state’s violence could erupt anywhere, any time, again conditioning everyone’s expectations.

Honecker was faced with the problem of how to reform the Stasi without damaging the hegemonic social control it exercised on behalf of the state. The innovations he made should sound eerily familiar to anyone navigating our present society’s profoundly dystopian turn.

First of all, the Stasi were successful because of the large number of volunteers for every Stasi agent in East German society, there were two civic-minded volunteers who helped the agency do its work by informing on their neighbours, friends, family members and co-workers. Taken together, including both direct employees and volunteers (these include only regular volunteers). Those who simply cooperated or fed information to the Stasi occasionally, or at their convenience, was likely about 2 million people, or 12% of the population. But those who made Stasi activities part of their day-to-day lives were closer to 250,000, around 2% of the population. These numbers peaked in the 1980s, having steadily increased through the 70s.

Stasi operatives, paid and unpaid, were disproportionately concentrated in the caring professions, such as doctors, nurses and teachers. Stasi personnel, both paid and voluntary, were also disproportionately concentrated in institutions wielding what we might call “syndical power.”

By “syndical power,” I mean institutions that exercise direct control over key aspects of society unmediated by conventional legislative bodies like parliaments, cabinets, central committees, legislatures, etc. medical associations, nurses’ colleges, societies of engineers, law societies, bar associations, self-governing professions with the power to unilaterally impose new protocols on society at large, unmediated by the state. These modern guilds are also spaces in which the commissar consciousness is at its purest, spaces in which one’s financial success is explained based on the syndical groups’ monopolization of expertise, one state power is used to defend but in which state power is not permitted to intervene.

Theorists inspired by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had long drawn attention to a specifically Marxist understanding of “hegemony,” noting that Marxists achieving state power means little in society in which capitalism continues to enjoy hegemony. Simply controlling the state means little when the major institutions of a society, its churches, its schools, its universities, its courts, its culture, etc. are firmly in the camp of the dominant ideology and where the dominant ideology conditions people’s understandings of fairness, justice, balance, reason, etc.

The control of key social institutions, especially educational and judicial institutions, confers long-term power on those who have captured these entities. And those seizing control of them through claims of meritocratic expertise and political deal-making are those most likely to have the class consciousness of commissars functioning, as they do, as senior gatekeepers and managers in society’s most venerable institutions. Furthermore, technocrats from the commissar class who gain power in the apparatus of the state find, in these institutions, natural, powerful allies with whom to engage in mutually burnishing one another’s power.

Because of their program of controlling these syndical systems, these institutional chokepoints in East German society, the Stasi had a unique and uniquely indispensable role in functioning as the connective tissue between state power and syndical power in creating and maintaining hegemony.

Already one can see how the Stasi possessed the power to make or break the careers of high-status professionals in their society without resort to the use of violence or the application of direct state power. University boards of governors, local law societies and medical associations, these institutions could make jobs vanish and professional certifications appear and disappear.

But the most powerful tool, and the most innovative of all of the weapons in the Stasi’s arsenal post-1971 was one we have forgotten to our detriment, well, mine anyway. Maybe that of a few of my friends.

Erich Honecker Discovers Cancel Culture

Zersetzung has no precise translation into English and certainly not one that encompasses all the new context and meaning that accreted to it during its eighteen years as the primary method of social control used in East Germany 1971-89. To carry out his foreign policy objectives, Honecker had to purge his state of virtually all extra-judicial state violence: no more public floggings, no more torture, no more extra-judicial killings. At the same time, kangaroo courts generating executions or, worse yet, political prisoners, to whom Amnesty International activists could write also had to be shut down. What could replace all the arbitrary violence on which the absolute power of the Socialist Unity Party had previously rested?

Zersetzung, roughly translated as “decomposition,” referred to a campaign of coordinated social, political, personal, reputational and professional harassment and humiliation against individuals organizing against or speaking out against the regime. Tactics might include such things as workplace harassment by superiors or colleagues and the generation of workplace grievances that might result in the demotion or ultimate firing of the target. But the primary immediate effect sought by the Stasi was simply distraction: the more time targets had to invest in saving their job or defending themselves against spurious and malicious complaints, the less time and emotional energy they could invest in battling the regime.

The family was a key site of action. Zersetzung sought to alienate its targets from their romantic partners, children and family systems or, at least, place these relationships in a constant state of crisis. By placing pressure on those who continued to associate with the target, they could leave them both materially and emotionally isolated and generate internal sources of pressure within family systems, whereby family members or romantic partners suffering from Zersetzung by proxy would place additional pressure on the target whose activities now presented a material risk to others. Family members and romantic partners would begin to see the target, rather than the Stasi, as the proximate reason for their persecution, for which there was a simple solution. Again, even if families and relationships did not immediately disintegrate, the Stasi could open a “home front,” in their war on the target, forcing them to reallocate time and emotional energy from fighting the regime to the conflicts that had erupted in their family system.

Friendships were not off the table, as Stasi operatives would go to work on any valued relationship the target had on which they might exert pressure. In addition, there were reputational attacks, through both rumour and through coverage in state-controlled media that sought to delegitimate the target. These attacks were given credibility as rumour or news story would typically mix damaging falsehoods about the individual with fact, often carefully woven together so that the falsehood and fact could not easily be distinguished.

The Stasi, themselves, described Zersetzung as follows:

a systematic degradation of reputation, image, and prestige on the basis of true, verifiable and discrediting information together with untrue, credible, irrefutable, and thus also discrediting information; a systematic engineering of social and professional failures to undermine the self-confidence of individuals; … engendering of doubts regarding future prospects; engendering of mistrust and mutual suspicion within groups …; interrupting respectively impeding the mutual relations within a group in space or time …, for example by … assigning geographically distant workplaces.

The success of Zersetzung was measured simply: did the target experience a psychological crisis or series of crises? Did the person become so bereft of reputation, friends, work, etc. that they no longer had time or energy to attack the regime?

One of the things that made Zersetzung especially effective was the reaction it engendered in those close to the target. Whereas, before 1971, Stasi activities were “open secrets,” acts of terror to be formally denied but whose efficacy was based on widespread knowledge thereof, e.g. torture, Zersetzung conducted in a more secretive way so that one could plausibly deny that it was taking place if provided with the correct incentives. Given a choice between believing that their society was liberalizing and that Stasi terror was a thing of the past and believing that the Stasi had developed an even more powerful mechanism of social control, there was a clear incentive to believe the former or at least behave as though one did.

People so wish to be free that they will cling desperately to any fiction that tells them they are free. To believe otherwise was costly. The knowledge that one is not free leaves a person a set of terrible choices: (a) to do nothing and feel oneself a coward for not fighting for it, (b) to decide that freedom is not a valuable thing and one does not desire it, or (c) to object to one’s unfreedom and court the nightmare of Zersetzung oneself. One therefore has strong incentives to believe that the fault lies with the Stasi’s target, that the target has become a bad person or, more easily, that the target has gone mad. This second explanation is hardly a stretch because targets of Zersetzung often were driven mad. And a factor in this madness was often the target’s friends’, colleagues’ or families’ disbelief in their accounts of persecution.

With this strong system of incentives, Zersetzung targets gradually did lose the will and capacity to fight the regime and, because it was in the material interest of those around them to deny what was happening, they often ended up, like the dissidents of the previous generation, incarcerated, not in hospitals but in psychiatric facilities. When the power of the Stasi was finally broken and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, about half of the targets of Zersetzung were so badly damaged by their experience that they received lifelong psychiatric pensions from the Federal Republic of Germany.

Blairite Austerity Before Blairite Austerity

As discussed in the previous piece in this series, East Germany had long maintained the illusion of ideological and political pluralism by maintaining the appearance of a multi-party political system and a large and democratic trade union movement. Of course, these organizations were totally dependent on state patronage to even exist but within this state patronage system, there remained high levels of organizational and operational independence, spaces where apparatchiks could carve out their own personal fiefs with their own personal patronage networks.

The Stasi were integral to that system. Operating with high levels of independence Stasi agents, both paid and unpaid, within these organizations were tasked with locating opponents of the regime and coordinating and prosecuting their own campaigns of Zersetzung against the dissidents they identified. While this information was shared with Stasi headquarters and used to produce a national list of dissidents, it was not Stasi HQ that put people on the list nor was it Stasi HQ that carried out the campaigns of decomposition. Those campaigns were left to Stasi operatives in unions, churches and the fake political parties that formed the coalition government.

In other words, Zersetzung was carried out on a largely freelance basis. Officials within the civil society organizations of the regime hatched and carried out these campaigns simply based on incentives, the need to maintain or increase the level of state patronage one’s organization received, the desire to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the regime and, of course, the opportunity to use the might of the state to fight out interpersonal rivalries and resentments.

Rather than emptying civil society, as dictators often do, the crew running East Germany had instead chosen to capture and colonize the organizations that had once been the institutional backbone of civil society, churches, parties, professional associations and unions, something that did not begin in the West until Blairite austerity.

The Neoliberalization of Zersetzung

To anyone paying attention, the thing I have been writing about is what we euphemistically call “cancel culture.” But how can these things be the same if there is no Stasi headquarters coordinating all the freelance cancelation? This misunderstands the nature of the Stasi at their height. They didn’t need Stasi HQ because the individual operations were coordinated out of the head offices of unions, parties and civil society organizations.

This is where we can see how the logic of neoliberalism has collided with the class consciousness of the commissars. Zersetzung runs just as well in a peer-to-peer network as it does in a client-server network. I know that one of the lists on which I appear is maintained by Lisa Kreut, the Vice President of the BC Hospital Employees’ Union. But is Zersetzung going to be less effective if it takes a while for Kreut to notice I am on someone else’s list too? Is a campaign of cancelation going to be less effective if two or even three Woke Stasi are competing with each other to see who deals the next major disruption to my life?

The real genius of creating a modern Stasi to carry out a campaign of decomposition against enemies of the commissar class’s ideology i.e. Wokeness is the discovery that people are so terrified of Zersetzung that they will maintain a double consciousness, insisting that “there is no such thing as cancel culture” and “he deserved to be canceled.” That is, after all, how every social media argument goes when someone says “I have been canceled.” The first move of regime supporters is to ridicule the idea that anyone is ever canceled and then, seemingly effortlessly, once presented with more details, to insist that cancelation is reasonable, deserved and would have happened sooner were it not for the great forbearance and generosity of the Woke Stasi.

Now, some of you may be hoping that I will now offer some sort of theory of how information about Zersetzung was somehow directly diffused to the Baby Boom generation in the 1970s and 80s by the KGB. I will make no such claim. Rather, what I will say is this:

There is a reason that East Germany came up with Zersetzung when other Soviet satellites did not: it was the first element of Honecker’s program: import substitution industrialization focused on inducing and anticipating consumer demand for manufactured goods. To carry out this program, East Germany had to develop a more sophisticated practice of management and advertising. In other words, their commissar class necessarily became more self-conscious and sophisticated in its efforts to revolutionize production. This is what allowed them to imagine Zersetzung.

That is because a sophisticated, self-conscious commissar class will naturally develop such a set of tactics as they constitute the logical terminus of management theory. Because the commissar class revolutionizes production through the new sciences of large-scale psychological manipulation, advertising and management, it logically follows that this will be the means by which they would also revolutionize society itself. Whereas, in the case of East Germany, the commissar class developed this consciousness in order to defend their hegemony, the commissar class of the modern Global North has developed it in an effort to depose the owner class and become the hegemons.

In this, my second Yuri Bezmonov tribute piece, I want to make clear that I see the incorporation of KGB subversion efforts into my larger theory of the rise of the managerial class are supplementary to my prior analysis. What I mean by this is that whereas I have previously argued that Wokeness/Identitarianism arose from the synergistic interactions of Blairite austerity and the postmodern critique, I am now arguing that KGB subversion efforts were nothing more or less than a third force in this synergistic relationship.

But even without active subversion efforts, the mere removal of the USSR and its vassals as a global political force would naturally have empowered and unshackled the managerial class to carry out the efforts at seizing power in which it has been engaged since the 1990s.

My comrade D’Arcy began to refer to the labour aristocrats, professionalized government courtiers, executive directors, management consultants and public/government relations consultants as “the commissar class” not because he believed in the Bezmenov theory (in fact, he was unaware of Bezmenov’s subversion theory) but because the class solidarity, shared agenda and paternalistic elitism of those known as the “professional managerial class” was so similar to the behaviour and consciousness of those who hijacked Eastern Europe’s communist revolutions 1917-49.

Thomas Piketty makes an important contribution to our understanding of this class when he writes of the rise of the “super-manager,” that portion of the super-rich who understand their status as arising from their expertise in revolutionizing production rather than their ownership of the means of production, even though, in many cases, they are also owners. Finally, we must tip our hats to John Ralston Saul and his work in Voltaire’s Bastards, in which he tracked the origins of the super-manager and the vacuity of the class’s moral theory.

Robert McNamara and the Early Commissars

A key early exemplar of this class, for Saul, was Robert McNamara, the US military’s efficiency guru who reorganized the country’s prosecution of the Second World War’s Pacific Theatre. By his own account, McNamara’s greatest contribution to the war was not his reorganization of bomber fueling that enabled the more efficient fire-bombing of Japan’s major cities but instead his use of statistical psychological data to reduce the rate at which bomber pilots aborted their missions.

It was on this basis that the Ford family, which had been struggling in its management of Ford Motors hired him as the first CEO unrelated to the Ford lineage that owned the company and compensated him with a significant portion of the company’s shares. As Ford’s CEO, his primary contributions, by his own account, were based on his ability to statistically aggregate psychological data in order to better modify the behaviours of both workers and potential purchasers of Ford vehicles.

McNamara became famous for this skill and it was on that basis that, in 1961, he was appointed Secretary of Defense by John F Kennedy and placed in charge of 40% of the American federal government’s budget. Many of the innovations in war that we associate with Vietnam can be traced directly to McNamara, such as the employment of Napalm, Agent Orange and other defoliants, all pitched to Kennedy’s and later Lyndon Johnston’s cabinets as measures to make the prosecution of the war more efficient.

It is also under McNamara that we see the US initiating a policy, amplified under the Nixon Administration and reaching a crescendo under Reagan of covert bombing in neutral countries adjacent to US imperial projects and the sale of arms to states at which the US and/or its vassals were at war to finance the very war in which the weapons were used, to defray the financial costs of continuing to prosecute those wars.

McNamara then went on to chair the World Bank, where he helped to develop, not just neoliberalism and its austerity policies but “structural adjustment,” the process by which the World Bank or its agent, the International Monetary Fund, would seize control of the budgetary and fiscal policies of debtor nations and supersede democratic decisions voters made at the polls. The policies that rolled out in the Southern Cone in the 1980s, following McNamara’s tenure were effectively the first instances of what we might call “technocratic dictatorship” outside of the Soviet Bloc.

Much ink has been spilled on how Argentina was ground zero for a new kind of politics, a politics under which most of us now live: political parties could campaign on whatever budgetary and monetary policies they wished but, once they achieved office, they discovered that the World Bank would determine those areas of public policy. Consequently, as we have seen unfold over the past forty years, democratic politics increasingly became about cultural, non-material issues because those were the only things people’s votes could actually affect.

Countries that pushed back did not just suffer at the hands of the World Bank, which effectively controlled the value of these states’ currencies, but at GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which later became the WTO (World Trade Organization). Being locked outside the world’s monetary system, based on the US dollar since 1943, and the world’s trading systems brought governments to heel within months as people’s money became worthless and whatever they might wish to buy disappeared from store shelves anyway.

The Mutual Fund, the Business School and the Postmodern Turn

In this way, the commissar class increasingly saw itself as naturally adversarial to those who gained democratic power and saw democratic power as a threat to its own. After all, it was the commissars, not the owners, who carried out the neoliberal reforms. Meanwhile, as shareholders ceased to participate democratically in corporate governance but instead handed their proxies in corporate votes to a new kind of business, Mutual Funds, corporations increasingly followed the agenda of mutual fund managers, drawn overwhelmingly from the commissar class.

Naturally, mutual fund managers trusted members of their class as the most competent corporate leaders and used their consolidated voting power to elect fellow members of the class to positions like CEO, CAO and CFO.

Whereas, in previous models of corporate governance, large shareholders (often from founding families like Ford) appointed fellow members of the owner class, the old school bourgeoisie/owner class, to high internal office within these companies. In other words, one amassed stock (by inheritance or profit in another company) and then ascended to leadership. But the commissar class offered a competing model whereby one was appointed to leadership by other members of this class who managed funds and held voting proxies and, from that position, compensated oneself with shares and stock options.

This ascendant class based these appointments on an expanding academic discipline, “business administration,” which purported to confer skill at and understanding of the management of people based on the ability to analyze and manipulate mass psychology through statistical analysis. Whether this actually made any company more efficient is entirely debatable. The point is that the commissar class could justify its amplification of its own power by using a meritocratic discourse of expertise, not in what the company made or did but in psychological manipulation. People who ran companies, according to the logic of the commissars, didn’t run them because they were rich, or because they understood the specific industry in which the company was involved, and had risen through its ranks, but because they were masters of an arcane science McNamara and his ilk had helped to create.

It was therefore perfectly logical that the commissars would endow business schools with funds to make more commissars. And as the austerity programs the commissars championed went into effect, these schools came to exercise an outsize influence on university cultures as they expanded financially while the rest of the universities saw their budgets contract. Logically, of course, the way to save other parts of the universities was to make them more closely resemble the business schools that produced the commissars or, conversely, to reassure the commissars by withdrawing into various forms of immaterialism so as not to produce graduates who might make competing meritocratic claims on the basis of specific, disciplinary knowledge as opposed to the meta-science of management. Humanities, social science and STEM programs that were losing state funding were encouraged to engage in internal austerity and/or “entrepreneurial” activities (e.g. recruiting foreign students and charging them higher fees), activities that were expected to be planned and carried-out by academic administrators, trained in management theory.

In other words, the postmodern turn and the rise of the business school were of a piece with one another, both driven by austerity, the ascendance of the commissars, Soviet subversion and immaterialism. By immaterialism, I mean that management was increasingly a science of psychological analysis and manipulation while humanities and social science scholarship relocated from describing the physical world to describing people’s thoughts about that world. The idea that reality is a social construction is one equally championed by the business schools and postmodernists who seized control of humanities and social science scholarship.

These processes were already underway when the Eastern European dictatorships that had helped create them collapsed one after another. But without the worry of the Soviet Bloc as competition and with the removal of any serious political alternative, commissar-driven austerity could accelerate, as it rapidly did in the 1990s, raising tuition fees, ensuring that those working class people who did rise through the university system would be heavily indebted and thereby more controllable should they attempt to join this ascendant class. And, with an increasing dependence on and enrollment of international students, the commissar class globalized, incorporating more of the emerging middle classes of the Global South.

Thatcherite vs. Blairite Austerity

Austerity is best understood as a two-phase process. Thatcherite/Reaganite austerity was a political force that was, in the Global North, a largely democratic one, in contradistinction to its highly authoritarian character in the Global South. This first type of austerity was driven the working class’s hatred of the ascendant commissar class. As management became increasingly manipulative and psychologically invasive, workers’ anger towards the bosses turned from the owner class to the junior members of the commissar class. And as the commissar class came to recognize labour aristocrats, often from family groups that had monopolized trade union power for multiple generations, as part of their crew, that anger also turned against a corrupt and out-of-touch union leadership class that was clearly culturally disconnected from all but the most white-collar union members. And labour aristocrats increasingly culturally identified not with the workers they represented but with the managerial class with whom they negotiated.

Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were able to gain public support for austerity programs on the basis growing working class hatred towards union leadership, their managers and members of the white-collar caring professions who increasingly intermediated their access to government services due to increasing means-testing for government aid, as part of neoliberal austerity programs. Meanwhile, as elected officials were pushed away from the role of intermediating and distributing government largesse out of concerns over “corruption” i.e. a material quid pro quo between voter and representative.

Thatcherite populists enacted austerity policies that ended up magnifying the power of the commissars by focusing their government cutbacks on frontline workers, and hiring commissars to preside over austerity. Or, they privatized or contracted-out government services, creating new corporations with shares and shareholders in which mutual funds could invest and install commissars as people presiding over the process of spinning off and selling off government services. While their friends, among the owner class, often bought these entities, commissars ran them and increasingly controlled even those they did not own. And these processes made sense on balance sheet because massive layoffs and wage cuts produced “savings.”

But these austerity policies produced democratic push-back. At the very moment that socialism was discredited the world over, political movements arose to install social democratic governments to reverse austerity in the 1990s. But the problem was that even the most independent states of the Global North were part of an integrated system run by the World Bank and WTO. Consequently, these social democratic parties found that they could not meaningfully change the economic direction of the states they governed and retreated to focusing on issues like abortion and gay rights, as issues on which they were still allowed to govern. So, instead, these parties transformed into new political formations known as the Third Way, epitomized in the regimes of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder. Their sales pitch was that they were offering austerity but with a human face. More on this here.

What they delivered was both a good deal worse and more insidious. The educated liberals and social democrats who ran these parties had been the primary targets of KGB subversion. By this I do not mean that they were in some way more inspired by Marxism-Leninism than others, as Bezmonov believed they would be. Rather, their consciousness was a purer version of the class consciousness of the commissar dictatorships of Eastern Europe, which held the proletariat in every bit the same degree of contempt as the owner class did, but in a more paternalistic fashion, more likely to see the free will, the free agency of the working class as something to be managed and chipped away at, lest the workers rise against them and reinstall the Thatcherites.

Whereas old school politicians and old school company orders operated within a transactional theory of their relationship with the working class, commissars believe in a technocratic theory of governance/management based on science and personal benevolence, in which ordinary workers and voters were not people with whom they made deals but people who benefit from their benevolence.

Naturally, it became vitally important that Third Way regimes demonstrate to the powerful commissars who increasingly controlled the corporations and the mutual funds that selected their leadership that they were more meritorious, that they were better experts who could more competently enact austerity. And so, they innovated, using psychometric data.

The most efficient forms of contracting-out and privatization, from a cost reduction perspective, magnify a sector of the economy unconsidered by Thatcherites: the non-profit/charitable sector. Until the 1990s, most charities and non-profit organizations were democratic, membership-based and rooted geographically. Most of their leadership and most of their decisions were made at members in general meeting or by boards elected by those members. But, in the 1990s, in places where Third Way governments held power, they were offered a Devil’s bargain.

The government would cut services in an area they were concerned about like environmental restoration, care for the elderly, care for the handicapped, hospice care, food banks etc. The state would then approach these organizations, which had previously been involved either in advocacy for greater state action in these areas or in supplementing core government services with a few services of their own and offered to hand them the job of providing those services themselves, for a fraction of the money the government had been spending on directly delivering said services through the state.

This was a more efficient form of austerity because:

• wages paid in the non-profit sector tended to be lower because workers choosing this career path feel guilt about taking money that might otherwise be spent on the cause they believed in;
• workers were less likely to unionize or otherwise feel adversarial towards management because of a belief that everyone involved was pursuing a shared altruistic project;
• there is much more abundant volunteer labour that could be used to supplement paid labour or, if necessary, replace it;
• non-profit and charitable organizations often waived educational requirements for paid positions that would be expected (or even required) were those positions in government or for-profit business;
• these organizations ceased to be sites of organizing against austerity or criticism of the state because they had become totally dependent on state funding, which, if disrupted, would compromise their charitable aims; and
• the democratic leadership class of these organizations yielded internal power to members of the commissar class they were forced to hire to manage their much-increased responsibilities, larger labour force and to ensure the continued flow of patronage from government; these folks were called “executive directors.”

In other words, Third Way austerity achieved three objectives: it reduced costs; it coopted organizations and people who had previously been watchdogs of the state into working as its apologists; and it created a whole new set of organizations the commissars could “manage.” This austerity program out-competed parts of civil society not conscripted by state patronage by using the resources and legitimacy of the state to capture an increasing proportion of charitable donations relative to those received by old school democratic non-profits.

When these entities were on the rise, they were referred to as QuaNGOs, i.e. quasi-non-governmental organizations as distinct from NGOs, non-governmental organizations. But, in the twenty-first century, our Newspeak has eliminated the term “QuaNGO” and now conflates these two radically different types of organization as “NGOs.”

It is only after the new dominance of the Mutual Fund, the QuaNGO and the Executive Director that the next phase of the commissar class’s seizure of power could proceed in the early twenty-first century, something I will cover in my next post.