people’s surplus goods and capital. While that “arrangement” was the embodiment of the grossest imbalance imaginable at a planetary scale … nonetheless, it did give rise to something resembling global balance; an international system of rapidly accelerating asymmetrical financial and trade flows capable of putting on a semblance of stability and steady growth … Powered by these deficits, the world’s leading surplus economies (e.g. Germany, Japan and, later, China) kept churning out the goods while America absorbed them. Almost 70 percent of the profits made globally by these countries were then transferred back to the United States, in the form of capital flows to Wall Street. And what did Wall Street do with it? It turned these capital inflows into direct investments, shares, new financial instruments, new and old forms of loans, etc.9
Although Emmanuel Todd’s vision of today’s global order is clearly one-sided, it is difficult to deny its moment of truth: that the US is an empire in decline.10 Its growing negative trade balance demonstrates that it is an unproductive predator. It has to suck up a daily influx of one billion dollars from other nations to pay for its consumption and is, as such, the universal Keynesian consumer that keeps the world economy running. (So much for the anti-Keynesian economic ideology that seems to predominate today!) This influx, which is effectively like the tithe paid to Rome in antiquity (or the gifts sacrificed to the Minotaur by the Ancient Greeks), relies on a complex economic mechanism: the US is “trusted” as the safe and stable center, so that all the others, from the oil-producing Arab countries to Western Europe and Japan, and now even the Chinese, invest their surplus profits in the US. Since this trust is primarily ideological and military, not economic, the problem for the US is how to justify its imperial role—it needs a permanent state of war, thus the “war on terror,” offering itself as the universal protector of all other “normal” (not “rogue”) states. The entire globe thus tends to function as a universal Sparta with its three classes, now emerging as the First, Second, and Third worlds: (1) the US as the military-political-ideological power; (2) Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America as the industrial-manufacturing regions (crucial here are Germany and Japan, the world’s leading exporters, plus rising China); (3) the undeveloped rest, today’s helots. In other words, global capitalism has brought about a new general trend towards oligarchy, masked as the celebration of the “diversity of cultures”: equality and universalism are increasingly disappearing as genuine political principles. Even before it has fully established itself, however, this neo-Spartan world system is breaking down. In contrast to the situation in 1945, the world does not need the US; it is the US that needs the rest of the world.
Against the background of this gigantic shadow, the European struggles—German leaders furious with Greece and reluctant to throw billions into a black hole; Greek leaders pathetically insisting on their sovereignty and comparing the pressure from Brussels to the German occupation during World War II—cannot but appear petty and ridiculous.
1 Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon, Indianapolis: Hackett 1994, p. 211.
2 See Jean-Claude Milner, Clartés de tout, Paris: Verdier 2011.
3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York: Penguin 2004.
4 There is also an interesting difference emerging between today’s China and Russia: in Russia, university cadres are ridiculously underpaid; they have de facto already joined the proletariat, while in China, they are well provided with a “surplus-wage” as a means to guarantee their docility.
5 True, part of the price paid for this hyper-remuneration is that managers have to be available twenty-four hours a day, thus living in a permanent emergency state.
6 One of Jacques Lacan’s more outrageous statements is that even if a jealous husband’s claim that his wife sleeps around turns out to be true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, we could say that even if most of the Nazis’ claims about Jews were indeed true (which, of course, was not the case), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological, since it represses the true reason the Nazis required anti-Semitism, which was to sustain their ideological position. Exactly the same holds for the claim that the Greeks are lazy: even if this were the case, the accusation would be false, because it obfuscates the complex global economic mechanisms that drove Germany, France and others to finance the “lazy” Greeks.
7 “The Global Minotaur: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis,” available at nakedcapitalism.com.
8 See Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, London: Zed Books 2011.
9 “The Global Minotaur: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis, naked capitalism.com.”
10 See Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire, London: Constable 2004.
The “Dream-Work” of Political Representation
In his analyses of the French Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath (in The Eighteenth Brumaire and Class Struggles in France), Marx “complicated” in a properly dialectical way the logic of social representation (political agents representing economic classes and forces), going much further than the usual conception of these “complications,” according to which political representation never directly mirrors social structure. (A single political agent can represent different social groups; a class can renounce its direct representation and leave to another class the task of securing the politico-juridical conditions of its rule, as the English capitalist class did by leaving the exercise of political power to the aristocracy, and so on.) Marx’s analyses point towards what, more than a century later, Lacan articulated as the “logic of the signifier.” There are four principal versions of Marx’s “complication”—let us begin with his analysis of the Party of Order, which took power when the 1848 revolutionary élan in France had dwindled. The secret of its existence was
the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists into one party, disclosed. The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions which alternately—the big landed proprietors under the restored monarchy and the finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July Monarchy—had maintained a monopoly of power. Bourbon was the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the one faction, Orléans the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the other faction—the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in which both factions could maintain with equal power the common class interest without giving up their mutual rivalry.1
This, then, is the first complication: when we are dealing with two or more socio-economic groups, their common interest can only be represented in the guise of the negation of their shared premise—the common denominator of the two royalist factions is not royalism, but republicanism. And, in the same way today, the only political agent that consequently represents the collective interests of Capital as such, in its universality, above its particular factions, is “Third Way” Social Democracy (which is why Wall Street supports Obama), and, in contemporary China, it is the Communist Party. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx goes on to extend this logic to the whole of society, as is clear from his acerbic description of the “Society of December 10,” Napoleon III’s private army of thugs:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohême; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the
