Domination Without Hegemony? w/ Juliano Fiori

Welcome back to After Order, a series from Macarose and the Alameda Institute exploring power, sovereignty and crisis in today's unstable world. This week I'm joined by Juliano Fiori, director at Alameda to look back at the series so far and discuss its core premise that we're not living through what Antonio Gramsci called an "interregnum", a moment where the old world is dying and the new struggles to be born, instead that our world is now one of sustained disorder and that this is itself now our permanent state of reality. In his own writing, Juliano takes this one step further, arguing that the very notion of order, as we've come to understand it, is tied to something specific and historically exceptional, the system of USHMN that has dominated global politics since the end of the Second World War. For Juliano this order is not only conceptual but material, sustained first by the unparalleled industrial base of American capitalism and then by its transformation into the hub of global trade and finance secured at every turn through military might. So what if anything comes next? The continued rise of China, a patchwork of competing regional powers, or a world defined by domination without hegemony. These are the big questions I'm putting to Juliano on today's "After Order". A final quick note to our listeners and viewers before we jump in. Our seventh and final episode of this "After Order" series will be taking place as a live event next week on May 12th at the Art House in Bethel Green East London. The event, political economy and the time of monsters will be hosted by Juliano himself, with speakers including senior economics commentator at the Guardian at Isha Chakraborti and economist and author Clara Matai. There are still a few tickets on sale and we'll leave a link in the show notes. So I wanted to start with a kind of scene setting question. You called the whole series "After Order", the five episodes we published so far have covered different aspects of this. We've had a look at "Orderant Liberalism" with Quince LeBodion and Bentonov. We've tried "Orderant and the Digital World" with Cecilia Rickup and Paolo Gibardo. We've done "Order and Local Resistance" with Gabrielle Tuminambar and then "Orderant International Resistance" with Varsha Gandhi Kota. I suppose the big question is, what do we mean by "After Order"? Why "After Order"? Where did the idea come from? Well, first of all, thanks a lot. James is great to be here with you and thanks for doing such a great job of hosting the series. And I mean, there has a proposition as an international institute to be contributing to strategic responses to catastrophe through research that's engaged with political and social organisation. And when we talk about catastrophe, we're talking not about the crises in the present that proliferate, but the big threats that already exist on the horizon in the collective imagination, those are ecological collapse, great power warfare and nuclear exchange, or just the more banal disintegration of the modern work society with rights and benefits. And so, discussion of "Order" - international order, but not just order at the international level - was a way of us engaging with critical structural problems today, but connecting what happens within nation states to what's happening within the international system, connecting a new geopolitics to crises, recurrent crises, in particular hegemonic crises, within nation states, within capitalist democracies, in particular. And that, I'm sure we'll come onto this. And that concept of order has been mobilised in different ways, increasingly, in fact, over the last 15 years or so. But it connects very much to other demands for control and demands for sovereignty. And so, sovereignty is the other concept that's really central to this project. And we argue it's perhaps the central political concept today, mobilising all sorts of different ways often defensively. But sovereignty is an interesting concept because it allows us to think about what's going on within nation states, but also how that's being translated into actions in the international realm. We have a discussion with Varship, who I think takes a slightly different view around what order is and whether it exists. Suggesting I suppose that it was always a kind of fiction. I mean, that's what Mark Carney said. It was a degree to which the liberal order, in particular, internationally was always a sort of fiction that everyone agreed with. And then on the other side, the sort of version of that, the sort of realist tradition in international relations, people like John Meersheimer, where you argue for a sort of very passive version of order, which is the, it's the happenstance result of a bunch of international institutions that kind of work together and then you get some sort of order there, but it's a passive order. It's not something that emerges spontaneously. There's no broader thing than just seeing what you have looks a bit like order. I think you find yourself somewhere in between those two positions that order has a reality to it, that there is a structure to the world that is not just what we believe in our heads or the passive outcome of different institutions. Yeah, that's perhaps correct. And I should purpose what I said by asserting that my arguments on order and why we're after order in an instance after order aren't necessarily the same as everybody within Alameer. We've come together to discuss this concept and this scheme, but having different approaches to what being in a world after order actually means. On one hand, I would agree with Varsha, and that was a great episode, by the way, that order is fictional in some way. It is often the object of the imagination of self-professal liberals and some of their critics, but it's also used or mobilized as a euphemism for an imperial situation. And so many anti-imperial critics of the concept are right in recognising that the sense that it gives of stability, of consistency, maybe even of peace and equality is only relevant to a very small portion of the world's population. So if there is a sense that it's euphemism, how is it mobilized as euphemism? Let's say as part of ideology, liberal ideas in particular, and people have referred to liberal order, liberal ideas have been mobilised or be inconsistently to exercise authority to reproduce power, to organise rivals hierarchically, to create institutions, and that itself is a dynamic process. Even when it is inconsistent, some of the inconsistencies can contribute to a process of ordering. So when a talk of ordering, I suppose I am pointing to something more dynamic than say John Meersheimer would presume, which focuses very much on the phenomena produced by order. But at the same time, I wouldn't want to give too much attention to immaterial factors, to ideology, because the concept of order reflects a material reality. So I would say that every order is a hegemonic order to use a Gramscian term. And what does that mean? So a normal situation of dominance might have been, let's say pre-capitalist kind of dominance, might have been developed through in particular violent forms of coercion. A hegemonic order involves not just coercion, but also forms of what he calls spontaneous consent. But that spontaneous consent is reproduced through a material structure. It's a dependent on a material structure. And if we look to the period that is referenced when people talk about order and international order, let's say the period of USagegemony, USagegemony was based on a material structure. It was based initially on the unparalleled expansion of a material base, which enabled the projection of economic and military power. But then the transformation progressively of trade and finance into mechanisms of the reproduction of that same power. My argument is that that material structure no longer exists. I mean, something in that to pick up on is your reference to Antonio Gramsci. And elsewhere, I mean Gramsci's never been out of fashion, really. He's always sighted all over the place. He's the one Marxist that you're allowed to quote in respectable circumstances. I've even seen the former Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove sighting Gramscian. One of his influences at various points. What you criticize, I think, this idea from Gramsci of an interregnum between different orders and different stable systems, there is a misquote, isn't it, from Gramsci? It gets circulated all over the place, often attached to it. As Simpson's me, you know, the all-world is dying. The new is struggling to be born now is a time of monsters. And this is the interregnum that we live in. But to describe it as the interregnum between reigns is to also say, "Okay, this is the dream between each time." And I think you take issue with that. You suggested that perhaps this sort of absence of conventional hegemonic power, or at least its weakness and possible disappearance, does not mean that something else turns up that looks like hegemonic power. Is that fair? Yeah. I mean, I don't necessarily criticize Gramsci's own conceptualization of interregnum, which was actually focused on something quite distinct to what people are usually discussing today. I would take issue with the way in which that concept has been mobilized increasingly over the last 15 years to discuss a collapse of order. If we think of ordering as the process by which a system of consent is produced and reproduced, what is it that really happens when we see the end of what existed in the 20th century, US, US, Germany, without sight of what's coming next? without. using the precise definition that I use for order. We can think of how has order been mobilized in popular discourse in commentary in recent times? And in fact, I don't want to give too much emphasis to end-gram diagrams, but you can see that the concept of order and certainly international order has been used much more over the last 15 years and it was used in previous times. Precisely at the moment of order's putative collapse. But when people refer to order, they're generally referring to that time after the Second World War up until maybe the financial crisis of 2007-2008, in which there was an expansion of global governance, international institutions, norms, et cetera, the UN, and that that created a system that wasn't just about US power. It was also about cooperation, the expansion of the aid industry, and all sorts of other things that are thrown into that. Well, what I'm saying is that is the thing that depended upon a material structure and the material structure was related to US Germany. That doesn't mean that everything was exclusively defined from the top down by the US government. So if you look at the UN itself, if you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, look at the Geneva Protocols on International Humanitarian Law, they were all partly formed through struggles from below. However, they were created in an enabling environment that was the system of consent of US Germany. Now, if the material structure of US Germany no longer exists, I can't see the material structure that on the horizon gives rise to a new hegemonic order, let's say, under Chinese leadership. And there are a number of reasons for that. The first is that such an order would necessarily be at the global scale. And if it were at the global scale, it would entail certainly some kind of direct military confrontation, possibly nuclear confrontation. Now, that is a possibility. And it's not one that we like to entertain, but it is a possibility. But more than that, there are questions when we look at the political economy of Chinese expansion that might lead us to question whether China is in the situation to direct its own industrial, productive expansion to continuously undermine US power, which is what would be required. So, short, China's economy is very different. It's managed very differently. But it seems to be starting to suffer from some of the pathologies of US capitalism itself, reduced productivity and demand, deflationary pressures that suggest if at least of some kind of secular stagnation, industrial overcapacity, rising debt, aging population. And there is, we might discuss a reggae later, but there is a discussion about financialization and its relationship to an autumn of expansion. China, the Chinese economy is increasingly financialized, albeit state-led financialization. And so there are questions there about whether China itself is in a position to assume a Germany. Also, questions about whether the Chinese government wants to assume a Germany. Now, what that doesn't mean is that there's no possibility on the horizon of any more stable situation than what we have. I'm just saying that that thing that we call order that we discuss in different ways, but has a sort of collective meaning that's mobilized, that thing doesn't seem to be coming back. That doesn't mean that we won't see the new and the liberal laments about the past order that seem to project a desire for residues of the last order in the new. They might actually come through in different ways. And I think we are witnessing the substantively new in this period. Now, there was all this talk by postmodern philosophers about nothing new, possible, no futures, et cetera. I think we are witnessing something that this world's historical and substantively new in this period. It's striking how long it's taken to get to the point where this has been recognized, though. It's not just a sort of liberal backward-looking view. You get it on the people who think they're quite radical. That, you know, it's 18 years now, this year, since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008, the starting, gotten the global financial crisis. And it's 18 years, you know, that's a, that's somebody born and is now a duller, and going to university. That's a significant period of time. And yet, for this entire period of time, we've had probably a dominant discussion on the left and on the liberal left, and across that end of the spectrum about the persistence of neoliberalism. That nothing has really changed. And if something is going to change, it's often phrased in the sort of backward-looking terms of we'll kind of get back to some sort of post-war, pre-near liberal version of the world. I mean, it's striking how difficult it has been to think about what might be coming up to it. So I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that. The discussion around left nostalgia, or even melancholia, I think, seems sort of relevant at this point. - Yeah, I've argued that what, in fact, has happened at the level of collective psychology is a generalization of melancholia, that there has been through the 20th century into the 21st century, a process in which expectations have increasingly disappeared. Previous expectations have disappeared. Let's say there's been a lowering of horizons or even a disappearance of horizons. There are Brazilian theorists who have engaged with this idea of decreasing expectations in particular. But that, let's say, up until the 1950s and 1960s, there was discussion about a new world, a new man. And then these ideas of the end of history, the end of future started to creep in. And you could see them in popular culture. You could see them in theory. In fact, Fukuyama's thesis on the end of history was maybe it's a potiosis, but it came rather late. In fact, there were ideas that history and ideology, everything was coming to an end far earlier than that. But there was something real about the loss of imagination. What I mean is, there was a material reorganization of capitalism, particularly in the West, that meant that a popular political imagination of something beyond, something transcendent, or even that there was some kind of imminent process that would lead to a utopian transformation, that seemed to disappear. It doesn't mean that, in fact, history and politics themselves came to a standstill, that there was a complete historical resolution. But what seemed to take over was a kind of political ethos built around humanitarianism in its broader sense. The horizon was no longer a revolution transformation. It was the totalization of inclusion within the capitalist present, and with that, rights and the reproduction of labor means of survival, all of those sorts of things. That, I believe, is what's been thoroughly challenged initially by the financial crisis in the West, although it was challenged earlier on the periphery. And since then, all the turbulence is in some way related to this loss of security for much of the population under capitalist democracy. And that is related to a kind of melancholia, a melancholia that is the loss of something that never really existed, to sound a bit psychoanalytical. But it's the loss of a thing that was lacking before. But it was a projection, and a illusion, a useful illusion, but something that was transformed into expectation. And I think that goes now beyond the left. It's right within liberal centrist middle class society, as well, because the humanitarian utopia of the long 1990s also has been thoroughly challenged. I mean, picking up on that, I suppose, but how far does the challenge go? You've mentioned, I think rightly, that order has a material foundation. So the classic post-war liberal order has a material foundation, which is the US productive forces. The America is a very big economy coming out to the second world war, can produce a lot. There's a transition in the '70s where the capacity to produce shifts eastward, but the financial and trade domination remains in place. These are material foundations, the fact that you can make stuff in China, put it on container ship, and send all the way to Los Angeles or Rotterdam or wherever is a material foundation for a certain kind of world order. So that's something that happens, because physically, materially, this is a capacity to make that thing happen. There's some interesting writing, notice, Koei Soto, the Japanese Marxist, best known for his promotion, I suppose, of degrowth communism to potentially deeply unappealing words jammed together in one glorious combination for at least some people. But writing about how the horizon that we need to think about is now condensed because of the environmental crisis that the Anthropocene, the disappearance of a stable, physical world that we've inhabited, essentially, for the entire time that modern humanity's being around, the temperature's very debit, but it's not varied that much. We kind of know where we are in a fairly immediate sense. This breakdown threatens something more fundamental to what our horizons for change might have to be. You see similar things in people talk about adjust collapse, that things are decaying and decaying potentially quite rapidly. So our range should be to work out how to make that, so it's not too bad. This is a radical shortening of the horizons you normally associate with the left in any form, like even a liberal left never mind, it's a revolutionary or more radical version of that. But how far does this absence of order attach itself to this collapse of physical reality? stability in the natural world effectively. There's a direct relationship. What's still not clear is how substantial the impact of that are on political process in the present. So I think it's definitely an accelerating force that's exercised by climate change as it's already affecting global supply chains, let's say, and as it affects questions of governance, therefore, and that does itself have an impact on political horizons. So if we think of horizons as ways of collectively imagining a possible future, I think there was something to the argument that the future had disappeared. I know you discussed Mark Fisher last in the last episode, the future had in some way disappeared. A particular kind of future was less present in a collective political imagination. That doesn't mean that there weren't material circumstances for a new future to eventually be developed. But the argument that we've developed and discussed a lot at Alamir, though, is that there has now emerged a new collective concept or collective imagination of the future. In fact, our literature, our art, our film, our theory are filled with images of a future. The only thing is that future is negatively valentist. That is, it is a dystopian, it is a dystopian future. It is the ecological collapse. And so as we see a proliferation of socio-environmental crises that are already products of the threat on the horizon, we see those proliferating in the present, that is producing an imagination which has an effect on politics. And it has often had a deleterious effect on political organisation. Insofar as you see the catastrophe on the horizon, and it can have a demobilising effect. I would actually say that a certain kind of, let's call it a strategic catastrophism, doesn't necessarily need to be demobilising or fatalistic on the country. In fact, recognising the catastrophic threat, even if it's just something that at the moment is positive in the collective imagination, can also have a mobilising impact for for organisation. On that, we already talked about Melancholia and the psychology of some of this. I suppose one version of, I call it kind of failing to accept or think properly about, I mean, Shoma prejudice is there, but think properly about what's happening is retreating to psychological explanations for every other thing that's happening. Donald Trump is like your locus for all of this, that if you want to understand what's going on in the world, you have to appear into the twisted mind of Donald Trump and work out how he's feeling when he wakes up in the morning and sends his first tweets or true social posts or whatever it is now. This is how we understand Venezuela. Even someone who is otherwise, I think, pretty sophisticated is understanding the dimensions of the situation that we're in. Adam Tuss does have a sort of, the Venezuela adventure is just crazy. It's just this sort of mad thing we're going to do. This sort of phony resource, colonialism with no rationality to it. I think somebody would reject that and reject the kind of psychology of Donald Trump as an explanation for the chaos in the world, fashionable as it is in some quarters. But then why is it that America is so rapidly being able to ditch the pretence of wanting a rule-based liberal order in the phrase that gets used? Why is it that Donald Trump is not just Donald Trump is able to do these things. He has a power structure around him in Washington, which goes along with this, very strikingly so. So what's the reason that this sort of cloak of liberal values and the rules and the rest of it was able to be discarded so quickly? I think you've actually done a great job in challenging the psychologistic explanations, for example of Trump's tariffs, saying that this isn't just madness. There is actually some even madness itself can actually contribute to a kind of strategic impulse, even if there isn't a strategic organisation involved. So yeah, it's obvious that to say the least Trump has his quirks. He's not alone among global leaders in that sense, but his quirks are particularly pronounced. And it's very easy to see the intellectual incoherences of Trump when he's extemporizes about interventions or anything, and everything at all. There's also incoherence between what Trump says, what Marco Rubio says, what Pete Higgseth says, what Scott Besson says, and it's difficult to piece things together. But for all his idiosyncrasies, which in fact, I mean, I'm not saying they're totally uninteresting. They are an object of curiosity, maybe even fetishistic curiosity for certain kinds of literary journalists. People interested more in the sort of aesthetics of power, which is an important field of analysis too, but maybe less of those who are trying to search for some kind of structural explanation. And so for all his idiosyncrasies, I would say that Trump is an accelerating factor of fragmentation and destruction. Giving too much attention to the personalistic psychologistic actually means we lose sight of the strategic dimensions to his incoherence. Susan Watkins from New Laferville has talked about strategic cacophony. I've referred to a kind of hyperspectacle that's created by Trump and the Trump administration, the way in which, if we think about Gidebois concept of the spectacle, the recession of reality into a kind of representation and abstract presence. Well, now it's the reality of contradiction that's turned into image, that's turned into an image that itself can be used to disorientate and while we're disorientated, well, then you can intervene here, you can rob our data there. There's all sorts of things that can be done in the middle. And it's clear that with military intervention, I think this is maybe where this strategic incoherence is clear. Military interventions in Venezuela, in Iran, but actually earlier with interventions and the destruction of Gaza. And it's not only Trump, in fact, with the Biden administration as well, the way in which that has been enabled. The absolute disinterest with respect to pretext, maybe it's an impossibility with respect to pretext. I think it's central here. And there has been a tendency for critics of US Empire, those in the left in particular, to discuss this as a kind of exhaustion of propaganda, maybe just in parentheses. I think the influence of urban and chomp ski and manufacturing consent is still very much present in the left in the way, which I actually find a bit troubling. It's interesting that if we think about when that text, that's sort of your text of soft left conspiratorialism, legitimate, I'm not the nine that there is a manufacturing of consent. But when that was published in the 1980s, it was precisely at the time in which the compulsions of capitalism themselves were becoming a much stronger force. And the left maybe looked to that idea of propagandistic generation of consent as a way to explain a loss, the loss of the future that had previously existed. In fact, capitalism seemed to have transformed itself in such a way in which propaganda was less necessary. And so my argument is that it's not that the exhaustion of pretext has led to a collapse of consent. It's the opposite. In fact, it's a collapse of consent within the international system and within US Empire that has led to the redundancy of pretext. Now, explaining how that consent has collapsed is more challenging. I would tend to focus on factors in dodging us to US Empire. So in particular, the increasing contradiction between imperatives, maybe even logics of state power on the one hand and capital accumulation on the other. I think we see this most clearly with respect to the relationship between the Trump administration, well, and Biden administration before it, but with vanguard fractions of capital, big tech, the staking intel, the pay for play accords with Nvidia and AMD, those aren't, I don't think social democratic attempts to put the state in control. There's a driving force of whatever. That seems to me an attempt to negotiate and renegotiate the relationship between state and capital in a moment when in fact the warring band of brothers is capital is itself warring in a way that seems to be more irreconcilable than maybe in the past. And that relates very much to the transformation of US capitalism into a regime of debt and asset appreciation, which has had profound consequences at the social level. I mean, you write about this elsewhere that the, and you can sort of, you can see how this is the flip side of it. And on the one hand, the breakdown of mechanisms of consent. I suppose you, and what you were just saying, I suppose we don't conclude that Bode Redog was right all along, rather than Chomsky in this instance that, you know, widely mocked in the 1990s was saying the Gulf War didn't happen. I saw it in my television. It turns out this is quite a prescient, a commentary on what we can see happening now with the Iran, where the sort of collapse of any ability to tell what is up or down and what's actually happening is really sort of quite striking. And in the middle of all this, of course, the I'll say pretty affectionate. use of a certain kinds of propaganda by the Iranian government and its supporters, for example, and this sort of mess of different claims and counterclaims being made from the US President Downies that were on the verge of continuing on the verge of winning, and Iran is continuing on the verge of collapse when cleanly and materially it isn't. That there's this sort of swirl of different things happening with no great logic attached to them, except for something you pick out, which is to note the relationship between the rise of informal employment, precarious labour in various different forms, and the increasing appearance of versions of violent coercion, whether that's ice raids in Minneapolis, or whether it's what you see happening at various borders around the world, or even I think you write also that the most extreme end of this, the connection to genocide in Gaza, that there's this informalization of the economy is also connected to the rise and the reappearance really of violence as a sort of organizing principle within that. Yeah, I do tend to focus on transformation of the world of work in some of the, in trying to account for some of the critical situations that we're discussing. I would focus on the precarious informalization of work as something that is accelerated at first on the periphery of the world system, and drawing on theories of peripheralization and some of the work on Brazilianization. I know that was discussed with Gabriel in the last episode, to consider how that process has now reached the shores of capitalism's metropolis, but if we look at the process of demographic expansion after the Second World War, but from the 1950s onwards, and Aaron Beninov has written some good stuff on this, urbanization was definitely a big part, but in fact there was demographic expansion within cities as well, reproduction within cities, but this process was more or less generalized throughout the periphery of world capitalism, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Now, with the Volkashok and it's, I can interest rates, the effects on debt on the periphery, the global debt crisis that that contributed to, but obviously it was primarily a debt crisis on the periphery, had most profound effects on the periphery. There was actually a slowing of that demographic expansion, but the effects on labor were very pronounced. And while there was already an informalization of the economy, it's bearing in mind that many of these economies on the periphery were going through a process of continuous primitive accumulation and informalization itself is a very hazy term, it refers to all sorts of things from family agriculture to people who are selling things on the streets, to some aspects of tech development and other things, but let's say the precarious end of informalization that massively expanded throughout the 1980s with structural adjustment programs, and it's really in the 21st century that that process comes to the shores of Europe and North America. But what we've already started to see in a place like Brazil where I live, it's actually interesting that in Brazil it's precisely at the moment of redemocatization that you see some of the breakdown of labor as a mediating force within society, the proliferation of urban violence to use the term that has been most invoked. And that breakdown of labor as a mediating function actually contributes to a reorganization of the state, the state in order to reproduce its own sovereign power through the neoliberal period when it's had its own capacities emptied out and it's had increasing demands from capital to actors of vehicle for accumulation. The state starts to subcontract some of its primary sovereign powers, not so much lawmaking and law preserving, but certainly some of its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. And so you see in a place like Brazil the growth of para-state paramilitary groups, along with drug factions, criminal organizations that might themselves often be in direct conflict, lethal conflict with the state. But they're serving a purpose in pacification of society that enables the state to reproduce its authority when there has been an emptying out. And that seems to be to some extent the case in the United States, actually, I think ISIS is a good example of that. ISIS are kind of shady, quasi-state enterprise because I mean they're acting on the limits of the law, on the margins of the law. So they're bringing back in a boomerang effect some of the technologies of imperial domination. But they're doing so in a way that is reproducing the compulsions that previously might have been less violently coercive in a way that is necessary to maintain some kind of internal sovereignty. That's one that's a sort of internal breakdown of different states now spreading into the into the global north. It's also quite hard, I think, to talk about the development of Brazil over the last 15 years or at least it's a financial price, it's probably longer. Without also talking about the development of China, the relationship between the two countries, the trade relationship of Brazil as a supplier of raw material, particularly agricultural commodities to China, has become one of the a number of decisive sort of trading relationships that exist in the world. And that whatever breakdown of order you might start to see internally, there's this question you've raised it or at least noted it, of the appearance of potentially a new power and a new ordering center for the world in China. But I think you're quite not suspicious, but a skeptical of the idea that China, World War II, could be able to become a new hedgemon in the world, in the way that somebody like Giovanni Origui writing about cycles of accumulation in capitalism, you get processes, long-term processes, by which the accumulation of capitalism is restructured, is attached to the appearance of new forms or new kinds of hedgehogany, new hedgehogons that are able to supply the kind of public goods to the world that sort of regulate the entire system in very different ways. And Irrigid traces 600 odd years of history from the Italian city states through the British Empire, through to America, as a process of the emergence of different forms of hedgehogons. But I think you're rather skeptical about where the China would ever be able to do that, we've touched on this at the start. What are the grows your skepticism here particularly? I'll tell you that there is skepticism. I mean, I wouldn't want to be too affirmative in my rejection of that possibility. We're obviously in the realm of speculation when we're talking about what kind of thing comes next. So I want to be a bit guarded, even though we are sort of proposing that we're in a time after order. You can look at Chinese official discourse, official rhetoric, but some time now, and recognize that there is a continuous critique of global hedgehogany. So back to the 1970s, the reproduction of Mao's, three worlds theory, US and USSR in a first world. There were some developed countries in the second world, and China was part of the third world in opposition to the imposition of a hedgehogonic system. Then in 1974, going to the UN and saying China's part of the third world. Of course, you need to be a bit guarded with respect to official discourse anyway. There's a book called unrestricted warfare that was published in the late 1990s, and I think it's become basically required reading at West Point Military Academy written by Kialyang and Wang Xieang Sui. And they talk about how, in particular, the rise of digital technologies have changed strategic spatial calculations, such that the reproduction of empire in a Germany no longer becomes possible. I think all of this is sort of interesting to bear in mind, and at the same time, views whether they're from the official realm or from its margins shouldn't be considered the main factor. I'm more interested in thinking about the strategic and systemic conditions that exist. Not least because in fact, systemic conditions themselves could lead China to need to pursue some kind of more global hegemon, even if it doesn't reach such, to maintain its competitiveness. What I'm saying, I suppose, is that I'm going back to a previous point about the material structure underlying hegemon. Chinese industrial and productive expansion would need to be directed in such a way that at the global level is continuously undermining US power in a way which I at this moment find difficult to see. Not least because we're now in a situation of climate crisis. And that's having huge impact not just on the US and on Western powers, but also very much on China, which of course is leading in many ways in developing new technologies that are delinking from the sort of energy matrix that Trump is betting on sustaining. But going into Auregi, there is a kind of superficial appeal to Auregi's schema, and even its trans-historical mechanism where you have this productive expansion that then leads to, and he draws on Browdell here, the autumn, which is a moment of financialisation, we can see. We can see there was that sort of thing that happened in the 20th century with the United States, and you go from this signal crisis, he calls it, and then you have a terminal crisis, and that might be what happened. I mean, he, along with other world system theorists in particular, Wallerstein were already talking about the collapse of US Germany in the 1990s, and so there's some credit that needs to be given, I suppose, that they were saying something pressing. Before it was cool. Yeah, before, yeah, precisely. In fact, Wallerstein went on to say that after US Germany, there would be an end of the modern world system, the historical capitalism would come to an end. But Auregi didn't, and I think there were a few things that are missed in Auregi's theory. First of all, the way he deals with financialisation wasn't exactly how it happened. I mean, financialisation has been, I suppose, combined, and even combined, in the sense that it wasn't just based on a universal principle, there were political impulses involved as well. Also, because he depends on a kind of commercialisation model of capitalism, he misses some of the ways in which he had hegemonic crisis within the nation's state connect to hegemonic crisis in the internationalism. But in particular, I think he underplays the uniqueness of the situation of US Germany in that it is at the global scale. And so you can't undo globalisation in the way that many people are saying it, end of globalisation. There is a sort of fragmentation, but many of the processes that reach global scale can't be entirely undone, even nationalising process of re-nationalisation. Those are dependent on a certain kind of globalising logic that seems to be there. If you're the US, you can say we're going to reach a certain production, right? We don't want to entire one anymore. This seems to be quite a geostritional, not a bad idea. So we put it all in Arizona somewhat improbably instead. Of course, you can try to do that. In fact, the US is trying to do that. But the different kinds of dependencies that are created, not least between different growth models, China's own growth model. The way it's, in fact, China, while it is challenging dollar dominance, it's still dependent on dollar dominance for various things. Most of the transactions that it's built, Dr. Morgan initiative are done in dollars. Many of its elites have dollar assets. The issues loans in dollars. Right, of course. Right, right. Exactly. And so there are different dependencies that are created through globalisation. Even when you nationalise, there's been a lot of sociological discussion about what re-nationalisation is and the extent to which it's the same thing or not to the process of nationalising in ideology and politics previously. But there are certainly contingencies, dependencies that are created between the global and the national that I don't think can be broken. That are critical to thinking about what emerges next in some kind of unstable equilibrium, let's say. Where does this leave sovereignty then? I mean, it's become, we're touching it right to the start. It's become a fashionable word once more. Not just on the right where most obviously happily sits, but increasingly, until recently anyway, on the left as well, and left sovereignty in various different forms and versions of, I'm thinking here of some discussion around, you know, Brexit for instance, and legs it's and what it might mean to leave the European Union and what a sort of left version of this might imply and a rescuing of some older versions of leftist discourse in Britain around that, for instance. But where does all this leave sovereignty? In a world that is, I think in your description, kind of inevitably somewhat globalised, it's always this sort of horizon of being really sovereign, never quite exists is what it's like. Sovereignty as a concept, as a claim, let's say, has been mobilised in all sorts of different ways and increasingly in this period of disorder and turbulence. My reading of that is that if we look back to other periods in modern history when there have been actual gaps between orders, that's usually when different kinds of images of the future have been produced collectively, you token ones and dystopian ones. What we tend to see now rather than having, as you had sort of fantasy-eclure period, those different kinds of images produced, you get very much the dystopian images. On the other hand, you get claims, defensive claims to control. That's actually reflective of a lack of control. And a lack of control generally, not just on the part of populations, but also on the part of different fractions of capital in their tussle with government in the international system. There are all sorts of claims, competing claims to sovereignty, and almost all of them relate to a defensive desire for control, even from the powerful. Now that doesn't mean that those claims are harmful or that they are necessarily going to be mobilized to the right because they're reproducing the system that currently exists or they're too embedded in ideology or anything else. I think there is an importance to claims of sovereignty in popular movements today in that it's a means of thinking collectively across heterogeneous actors. What is the degree of control that is required and over what its connection to territory, what its connection in particular in a climate crisis to the basic means of survival, through its energy, increasingly digital infrastructure data. Those questions seem absolutely key for thinking about how to generate different forms of resistance to state power when it's exercised in a way that reproduces dominance, but also to different actors, whether those be the power state actors that I mentioned that are subcontracted by the state or whether those be big tech companies and their dark enlightenment ideologies. I think there is something important to grapple with. There's also a way in which an attention to the tendency of sovereignist discourse to lead to nationalist politics or often even ethno-nationalist politics distracts from the way in which there is potentially a new basis for a totalising objective with the climate crisis. That is a new basis for some kind of universal project that brings people together in a moment of fragmentation heterogeneity. I don't think it's too messianic to think in these terms and it goes back to in fact the point on precarious informalisation as well. Because if on the one hand you have the climate crisis that is creating a universal problem for humanity with different effects, on the other hand you have this process in which there is a transformation of the surplus populations of the world into superfluous populations. When I mean superfluous populations, those that are truly marginal to regimes of accumulation, something that we've seen in this process that I mentioned from the 1980s onwards on the periphery and increasingly in other parts of the capitalist world. And this is a genocidal impulse that's created within capitalism that shifts that shifts populations that were part of a reserve army of labour into marginal populations. The only thing you can do with a superfluous population is to excise it and to expel it. And I think the most troubling, brazen manifestation of this has been Gaza in some ways. You see in Israel a regime of accumulation that was dependent on Palestinian labour. Until certainly the sort of neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, when cheaper labour started to be increasingly imported from elsewhere. So you have domestic workers from Philippines and Nepal and India and you have agricultural workers from Thailand and construction workers from Romania and China. And at the same time as the population of Gaza is still very much dependent on Israeli circuits of capital as well as foreign aid, it's no longer instrumental to the same regime of accumulation as it once was. Now there are obviously other factors involved in the genocide in Gaza. But I think that's an important focal point for analyzing this new basis. Now that's extremely troubling and at the same time that creates creates a new common condition in the same way that the climate crisis is extremely troubling but creates a new common condition. There is a commonality in precarity and in insecurity that goes from informalized works at the base of the pyramid through the professional classes. And so I think if we look at the question of going back to the question of sovereignty, whose claims can now connect in a different way to some kind of universal project that spans across or connects across heterogeneous actors? Well, just on that. I suppose the final question is to try and think about what hope might look like, but you've touched on it a bit, I think, which is this sort of common experience of breakdown and climate crisis in particular. But what would that start to look like in practice? And I suppose really finally, what makes Rallamada? How does Rallamada's work connect to all of this? There's a starting point which is recognizing a profound dilemma in the context of hegemonic crisis within states and within the international system. And it's addressing that dilemma that is required. There's no simple answer. You discuss some of this last week with Gabrielle, how you need to revisit some of the premises of political organisation. One bit to this dilemma is what you do as people organising in resistance and looking for some kind of emancipatory project with relation to the state, the sort of two stage move where you take over the state and then you transform things. That's historically not worked quite as planned. And at the same time, if you wanted to develop just autonomous projects without looking at how to scale your inner bit of a fix as well, at least others are in a fix. So trying to think at different scales is the first thing. Think at different scales without necessarily depending upon a common horizon, but on different needs that need to be met in the context of crisis. The organisation that then requires at the international level is one that I think we can see hopeful signs in response to some of the most troubling things that have been going on. Different forms of collective resistance that do include states on a sort of occasional basis, but also about connecting populations in their common conditions. And there's a kind of solidarity that I think is now increasingly based on a common condition, which goes away from the human rights expressions of solidarity that we're increasingly common from the 1970s onwards. As that relates to Alameda, I suppose our desire is to contribute to making those connections. It's about being able to provide analysis that is informed and directed by our coordination or connections with different kinds of political and social organisation, to be able to understand what's going on in different social struggles and the front lines of those different social struggles. But doing so in a connection with analysis at the global level, what is going on in terms of the big structural changes and how do you organise collectively to address those? Julie Yolifuri, thank you very much for your time. Thanks so much James. It's been a pleasure.