Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (17 page)

Domestic discontent and inter-state rivalry feed off each other. It was Ben Bernanke's book on the Great Depression that taught us the monetarist truism: ‘To an overwhelming degree the evidence shows that countries that left the Gold Standard recovered from the Depression more quickly than countries that remained on gold.'
²³

The lesson is this: he who devalues his currency first escapes the crisis first. In the 1930s, tight monetary policy, driven by adherence to gold, exacerbated the depression.

This time there is no Gold Standard, but a system of free-floating exchange rates. Britain was first out of the blocks to devalue—the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, told colleagues privately that he was proud of his contribution to the 20 per cent slide of sterling after 2008. America launched an effective devaluation strategy with QEII, despite simultaneously claiming to be for ‘a strong dollar'. Then, during the desperate flight to safety in August 2011, when both America and the eurozone toyed with default, others piled into the currency game: Switzerland and Japan sold mountains of money to try and depreciate their own currencies. China's policy is, of course, permanent undervaluation of the renminbi.

So we are already into a new phase, in which one country offloads the costs of crisis onto another, the rich offload the costs onto the poor and the old onto the young. As the pain increases, ideologies of resistance will get stronger, and there is a danger that they will become magnetized towards nationalism and protectionism. The blue-and-white flags on the steps of the Greek parliament, the Gadsden flags waved by the US Tea Party (a 1776-era rattlesnake logo and the motto ‘Don't Tread On Me'), and the anti-migrant sentiment flaring from Arizona to Athens, all attest to this.

But these are just advance warnings. If the acid eats through the hull of the spaceship and globalization is replaced by competing economic blocs, as it was in the 1930s, then all bets are off in terms of the diplomatic and military certainties that have prevailed since 1989.

So much of the fabric of our lives is woven into the system based on globalization that there is, in many respects, more at stake than there was in the collapse of 1929. Because we in the West have experienced real and rising personal freedom during the last twenty years, the end of it might feel rather more like the end of the belle époque in 1914.

The most dangerous thing is that, even now, it becomes rational for politicians, strategists, global corporations and military planners to prepare for a fragmented world. It becomes rational for policymakers of both left and right to ask: what shall we do if the currency war turns into a trade war? How would we rebalance our economy unilaterally if world conditions turn against us? It becomes absolutely logical—as the UK's Strategic Security and Defence Review did—to ask: how many aircraft carriers would we need if globalization breaks down?

That is the real problem with the ‘error de sistema'. It poses, for all shades of old-school political opinion, a very stark alternative: either fight for a new, more equitable and sustainable form of globalization—with new treaties, new transnational organizations, a new deal on global currencies; or retreat behind national barriers and stage the battle between the classes over social justice and redistribution there.

Sources of support for the latter course of action are strong, albeit screened out of the mainstream. When I met steelworkers in Gary, Indiana—skilled and educated left-wing Democrats, determined to force Obama to take on the banks and deliver union rights—they told me: ‘If it means trade war with China, bring it on.' Probably the only thing they could agree on with the Tea Party was that.

But trade wars, whether driven by left, right or centre, have a negative logic that can escape the intentions of the participants. As Charles Kindleberger's masterly account of the Depression showed, ‘by advancing its own economic good by a tariff, currency depreciation or foreign exchange control, a country may worsen the welfare of its partners by more than its own gain … so that each country ends up in a worse position'.
²⁴
Kindleberger concluded that only a hegemonic power could hold things together in this situation; a country prepared to absorb unwanted produce, accept IOUs from everybody and maintain the flow of investment capital as it dried up elsewhere. It was the fall of Britain and the delayed emergence of America that ultimately accounted for the prolonged Depression of 1929–39, Kindleberger said: the parallels with the decline of America and the non-emergence of China as a world power are very clear.

But the stakes go higher than even this. Globalization and the techno-revolution have created new forms of human behaviour, culture and even consciousness that would be unlikely to survive another breakup of the world economy.

Any repeat of the 1930s economically could provoke a culture war just as bitter as the one that turned Berlin from a tolerant, jazz-age metropolis into a racially pure Wagnerian wasteland in the space of five years—but this time on a global scale.

These are the risks the world is running with every month that the economic causes of discontent go unaddressed.

7

‘I Tweet in My Dreams': The Rise of the Networked Individual

In 1910 the composer Frederick Delius wrote an opera so revolutionary that nobody noticed. The plot was thin: a few static scenes from an obscure Danish novel—‘pictures', Delius called them. The premiere, four years later, was cancelled because the First World War broke out. On its first performance, in 1919, it flopped.

Nobody liked
Fennimore and Gerda.
Even Delius's biggest fan, the conductor Thomas Beecham, described it as a story about ‘three rather dreary people who have nothing to sing'. But if you listen to the music you can hear what was revolutionary.
Fennimore and Gerda
is the first opera written directly about modern, liberated sexual relationships, dispensing with the pretexts of historical or exotic settings. It is, above all, about being free.

And it is a product of an age very much like ours. The decade before 1914 saw an unprecedented surge in human freedom, a freedom that found expression in all kinds of literature and art: the early D. H. Lawrence, Andre Gide, Klimt's
Beethoven Frieze
with its lesbian orgy, painted in 1902 and immediately covered up. There's C. P. Cavafy in Alexandria daring to write, by 1904, his ultra-sensuous gay love lyrics, and of course Picasso, whose
Demoiselles d'Avignon
changed everything.

John Maynard Keynes would eulogize that age as an ‘extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man'.
¹
In his memoir
The World of
Yesterday,
published in 1943, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig summed up the Zeitgeist of globalized trade, technological progress and sexual liberation:

There was progress everywhere… There was more freedom as well as more beauty in the world… I feel sorry for all those who did not live through these last years of European confidence when they were still young themselves. For the air around us is not a dead and empty void, it has in it the rhythm and vibration of the time.
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But the decade before 1914 turned out to be a giant false start as far as freedom was concerned. It was followed by a century scarred by economic crisis, militarism, genocide and totalitarian rule.

After the First World War, of course, the cultural elevation of the self took off in earnest. Controversial stories of sexual adventure, psychological rebirth and revolt became ten-a-penny. But by now these artists and writers were out of sync with the ‘rhythm and vibration of the time'. With eighteen million war dead and the world in the grip of revolutions, the Zeitgeist had become collectivist, not individualist. Individual human freedom was on hold—except for the rich, or those prepared to flout accepted social norms.

It's hard to remember, given the status we now accord writers like Joyce, Fitzgerald, Miller, the Lawrence of
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
and artists like Klimt and Picasso, that such status eluded them in the collectivist decades. Henry Miller's work was banned in the USA as late as 1964;
Lady Chatterley
in the UK, famously, until 1960; Klimt's frieze was not publicly exhibited again until 1986; even Picasso himself did not dare exhibit the
Demoiselles
until 1916.
Fennimore and Gerda,
by no means challenging compared to the atonal music of the 1910s, would not be revived until—you guessed it—1968, and then only by a group of amateurs.

In the depths of the twentieth century, even the rebels began to accept the impossibility of breaking free. Koestler's
Darkness at Noon,
Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Sartre's
Roads to Freedom,
Vasily Grossman's
Life and Fate
all speak to the same problem: that in a time where the great forces of progress and reaction are totalitarian, only the dedicated ‘party soldier' is really free.

In the 1960s, however, individual freedom attempts to make a come-back. It begins in late 1950s America, with the Beat Generation, as personal wealth rises, education becomes liberal and disillusion sets in at the apartheid and militarism of the USA during the Cold War. It's not just the ker-rang of the electric guitar that fragments the old order but an outburst of reportage journalism, which tears apart the long-peddled illusions about policing, race and, above all, the Vietnam War.

The students who wrote the iconic Port Huron Statement, in 1962, summed up the nature of the break which young radicals of the day were attempting with the collectivist past:

We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs.
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It's become fashionable now to interpret those liberation movements of the 1960s as the doomed precursors to neoliberalism. Thus the Port Huron Statement becomes the founding text of Thatcherism, and the Hell's Angels gang-bangs a rehearsal for the financial Big Bang of the 1980s. In free-market capitalism, says this interpretation of the Sixties, the children of'68 got what they wanted, and indeed deserved: individualism, the collapse of institutions, and profound disillusion.

I propose a different reading. The Port Huron generation failed to achieve the humanist revolution they desired because: a) the level of technology was not then adequate to make personal freedom possible for the majority; and b) the forces of collectivism, nationalism and corporate power were, at that point, stronger than the forces fighting against them. Nevertheless, the 1960s laid the basis for a new model of individual freedom, which, though never fully realized, was at least clearly conceived: it's been labelled ‘networked individualism'.

The networked individual

If you've ever seen somebody transfixed by their BlackBerry in the middle of a riot, you've seen a networked individual. If, in a multi-player computer game, you've ever led a squad of Russian
spetsnaz
to storm a nuclear power station, then you are a networked individual. If you cannot understand how somebody can simultaneously watch TV and tweet about it on their iPad, you are struggling with the concept—but hurry up: 60 per cent of all young people use a ‘second screen' while watching TV.

Social theorists observed the beginnings of ‘networked individualism' very early in the development of information technology. Sociologist Barry Wellman identified birth control, divorce laws, women's participation in the workforce, and the zoning of cities into suburbs and business parks as preconditions to the Internet way of life. Long before Facebook came along, Wellman noticed that people preferred to live with multiple networks, flat hierarchies and weak commitments:

Rather than relating to one group, [people] cycle through interactions with a variety of others, at work or in the community. Their work and community networks are diffuse, sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries.
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But the theory of ‘networked individualism', pioneered primarily within sociology in the 1990s, was at first focused on patterns of interaction within groups. Fifteen years into the communications revolution, it's possible to see equally profound impacts on individual behaviour and even consciousness.

The sociologist Manuel Castells observed, in an oft-cited 2003 study of Catalan Internet users, that web use had begun to produce new attitudes and behaviours
away
from the computer:

The more an individual has a project of autonomy (personal, professional, socio-political, communicative), the more she uses the Internet. And in a time sequence, the more he/she uses the Internet, the more autonomous she becomes vis-à-vis societal rules and institutions.
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The emergence of a new kind of individual with ‘weak ties', multiple loyalties and greater autonomy is, as sociologist Richard Sennett argued, the product of big changes in the workplace and in consumption, driven by technology. Obviously, this has implications for the future. But it also affects how we might interpret the past.

One of the great contributions of historical materialism was to allow us to understand pre-industrial conflicts—for example, the German Peasants' War of 1525, or the English Civil War of 1642—as essentially class struggles, despite their religious trappings. The past could be reinterpreted from the point of view of the present, which by the mid-nineteenth century was dominated by class relations.

Now suppose—at the risk of annoying Hegelians, orthodox Marxists and mainstream sociologists—we tried to reinterpret the ‘class struggles' of the industrial age from the point of view of this emergent networked individualism. If you are into ‘teleology'—that is, history as progress towards an ultimate, predetermined goal—you could even rewrite the whole story of the last 200 years as the emergence and suppression of the free, networked individual. Let's try.