Keynes,provincialized?

Geoff Mann’s essay offers a thought-provoking intervention in two senses. He intervenes into genealogies of European thought, suggesting that radical political economists’ relatively recent fascination (in desperation?) with Keynesian thinking—particularly in light of regulation theory, neoliberalization, and now the 2008 crisis—takes on different resonances once the specter of Hegel comes into view as a precursor of the same line of thinking. Among geographical political economists, this is a novel and fascinating connection (we tend to dismiss Hegel as an idealist, not appreciating his contributions to political economy). He also intervenes into radical geographic thought by reflecting on ways in which this line of thinking creates discomfort about embracing the disruptiveness of social revolution, for those of us who position ourselves as radicals.

As I understand Mann’s reading, both Hegel and Keynes (together with a long line of related figures since Hegel) share a long-standing concern for capitalist modernity’s inherent tendency to generate inequality (poverty and unemployment), as well as an anxiety about the potential for the societal disorder this can trigger. He ascribes this anxiety to a skepticism about whether coherent alternatives can emerge from within a civil society marginalized by processes of uneven development—diagnosed as a ‘distrust of the masses’ (Mann, p. 129), but also about the capacity of representative democracy to give direction to civil discontent. Instead, this line of thinking is attracted to the idea of deploying state power and elite expertise to craft a ‘revolution without revolutions’, tackling inequality and poverty and saving capitalism from itself. Taking a creditable reflexive turn, Mann notes how he (with ‘many on the left’, p. 129) finds himself waylaid by similar anxieties: ‘Keynesianism appeals, even though we know its dangers’ (Mann, 129). ‘Keynes is our Hegel’ (Mann, p. 128), making us ‘all Keynesians now’ (Time Magazine cover, December 31, 1965). ¹

Mann expresses a very real anxiety and quandary. On the one hand, within and beyond critical human geography there is considerable fascination with the possibilities of ‘proper’ politics in civil society, one that actively disengages from the state: the multitude is ubiquitous, flat ontologies rule, and anarchism is back on the agenda (Clough and Blumberg, 2012; Hardt and Negri, 2004; Springer, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2011; 2012: 15; Woodward et al., 2012). Indeed, representative democracy seems increasingly futile as a means for challenging economic power, with the political process dominated by elite interests, funding and messaging. In response, we have followed (usually from afar) some remarkable moments of revolution and near-revolution North Africa and the Middle East, and the Occupy movement had significantly disruptive moments as it jumped scale, all too briefly, from Zuccotti Park to cities worldwide. Militant particularisms seem capable of escaping the trap of locality—particularly in today’s networked world—even if the result may not be the kind of mass oppositional movement imagined by Harvey (Featherstone, 2005).

And yet … Occupy was shut down by state action, and the Arab revolutions have descended (as revolutions so often do) into violence, hierarchy and reasserted state and military power. Many influential thinkers on the left align more in word than deed with these events, more comfortable launching barbs against capitalism and representative democracy from behind the walls of their own prosperous and secure livelihoods, and celebrity status, than they are on the barricades. Thus I cannot help but suspect that Mann may be right: When push comes to shove, do radical academics resort to the security of the ivory tower and the police instead of risking the uncertainties of street politics (perhaps they are more useful in the classroom than on the street)? If so, what does this have to say about all our talk about revolution, about sublimating personal to common interest (Mann, p. 8), and about overthrowing capitalism?

I have some relatively minor quibbles with details of Mann’s argument. Do poorer economies have less capital (p. 122)? Post-Keynesian economic and geographic theory would immediately question that tendentious claim, redolent of neoclassical theories of economic growth (Borts and Stein, 1964; Sheppard and Barnes, 1990). Did Keynesian thinking beget neoliberalism? Arguably, there was an oedipal relationship between father Keynes and son Hayek, stemming from their time together in Cambridge. I question, however, that neoliberalism was ‘ideologically impossible without the political economic foundations the Keynesian integration of state and civil society produced’ (Mann, p. 131). If he means, by neoliberalism, discourses propounding a minimalist, ‘night watchman’ state (not Hayek’s position), then perhaps his point is that antistate ideologies presuppose an already existing interventionist state. That seems little more than a tautology, however, and need not imply a Keynesian/Hegelian preexisting state (surely not all state-led political economic formations are reducible to Keynes/Hegel). If he means really existing neoliberalization, then these practices indeed depend heavily on repurposing preexisting state power for neoliberal ends (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Peck, 2010). Again, however, there is no reason that this preexisting state power need be Keynesian. If a Keynesian formation was already present, then neoliberalism would need to abrogate it in word by repurposing it in deed, but is it always already present (consider China)? Further, there was nothing inevitable about Hayek following Keynes: The question of what would replace Fordism after its North Atlantic crisis was not predictable, but overdetermined by a variety of political and ideological developments (Lipietz, 1986), only one of which was reasserting ruling class interest over labor activism (others include strategies of the neoliberal thought collective, the emergence of new spaces of industrialization outside core industrial regions and the working class voting Republican/Conservative).

Mann’s related claim (p. 131), ‘to return to Keynes now, is not necessarily an anti-neoliberal move’, suggests, correctly, that Keynes and Hayek are not chalk and cheese. Both saw uncertainty as the key challenge for capitalism, rejected neoclassical mathematical economic theory and sought to save capitalism from itself (Butos and Kopl, 2007). But identifying these overlaps elides the potentially stark difference between Keynesian state-led actions to address inequality and poverty and the actions of a neoliberal state infused with market-based norms and practices and ideologically opposed to redistribution and any ‘road to socialism’. Perhaps Mann’s broader, quasi-tautological point is that the state always matters—but must this pass through Hegel and Keynes?

My larger issue, however, concerns the implications stemming from Mann’s failure to interrogate the spatialities accompanying his genealogy. In stressing the ‘historical specificities that explain what produced Keynes’s ideas’ (Mann, p. 121), he elides the spatialities of knowledge production. But all epistemologies are at least initially local, in both the philosophical and geographical senses of that adjective: Scientific knowledge (in the broadest sense of science) is also spatialized (Livingstone, 2003; Longino, 2002). Thinking geographically, Mann’s genealogy is implicitly a place-based (European) account of discourse and practice. He narrates a trajectory of thought and practice that stretches through (European) capitalism from the early 19th century to the present—into which the ‘we’ of his essay (radical Anglophone intellectuals, steeped in European philosophy) seamlessly fit. It is a narrative of ‘modernity’, of ‘the role of the state enlightened by Keynesian reason’ (p. 124, my emphasis), ‘the product of a set of historical and geographic conditions endemic to capitalist modernity in the global North’ (p. 128), making ‘[e]very capitalist crisis’ a Keynesian moment, ‘necessary and omnipresent … in all modern thinking on capitalism’ (p. 131). ²

I am no postcolonial theorist, but Mann’s language is redolent of what has been dubbed Eurocentric thinking: unhyphenated modernity (Bhambra, 2007), Europe as the capital of capitalism (Blaut, 1993), enlightenment thinking and the global ambition of accounting for capitalist crisis here, there and everywhere. Chakrabarty (2000) would call this a History 1 of capitalism and the state—a history that needs to be provincialized. Within this implicitly territorial imaginary, civil society, and revolutionary potential also are marked as European (In the days of Marx and Lenin, revolution was a multinational project, whereby revolution at the national scale, initially in Europe/Russia, possesses the potential to diffuse worldwide).

If we unpick the threads of Mann’s genealogy, making visible and disrupting its European territorial imaginary, what else comes into view? Consider, first, the question of whether capitalism is European. Even asking this question risks derision: it seems obviously, historically the case. But if we open our thinking to the multivalent capitalist practices strewn across the trading cities of the ‘old world’ prior to the Great Divergence (Pomeranz, 2000), who is to say that the version taking root in Europe must be taken as the ideal type (cf. Weber) around which all of those variegated capitalisms of long ago and far away clustered? If it seems that way, perhaps this is because European thinkers were influential, and abstracted their theory of capitalism from the version they experienced (particularly in 19th-century Britain). Does presenting this as the essence of capitalism amount to European hubris? Second, consider the complex geohistorical relationship between slavery, colonialism and capitalism. Set aside methodological nationalist and stagist accounts of capitalist development, to be found in sources ranging from arch-modernist Rostow to particular readings of Marx’ historical materialism as slavery begetting feudalism, which begets capitalism, and so on (e.g. Rostow, 1960; Warren, 1980). Consider more ‘relational’ interpretations. What does it mean for Mann’s argument to acknowledge that the success of European capitalism—and its elevation to capitalism tout court—was dependent on such absent presences as Europe’s favorable positionality with respect to the Americas, the colonialism that made Europe’s industrialization (and Asia’s deindustrialization) possible, and the slavery and racism at the center of that colonial project (Baptist, 2014; Baucom, 2005; Beckert, 2014; Hobson, 2004; James, 1938)? Finally, consider whether trajectories of state and capitalism across the world, as we experience them today, can be collapsed into Mann’s narrative.

First, if we open ourselves to the possibility that the Hegel–Keynes (–Hayek) axis of praxis is just one way to make sense of one variant of the strange attractor that is capitalism, that necessarily raises the possibility for a variety of forms of the state (preexisting but then coevolving with capitalism), and of conceptions of its role in mitigating capitalist contradictions. I do not dispute the relevance of Mann’s account, but raise questions about its ubiquity. Second, acknowledging that the global influence of capitalism’s North Atlantic model remains dependent on Europe’s global positionality, colonialism and slavery open new vistas onto this axis. It follows that capitalist-induced inequality, as well as the nature of and prospects for a political civil society, are confounded by labor aristocracies, underdevelopment, racialization and the more-than-capitalist nature of those economies we label as capitalist. ³ The same goes for visions of the role of the state and of elite expertise in mitigating such problems.

Third, therefore, we find ourselves in a position to question the ubiquity of the conception of the state mobilized by Hegel, et seq. This conventional narrative begins with the Treaty of Westphalia, the spatio-temporal event that called the European nation-state into existence and defined its properties. It then goes on to describe how that model diffused worldwide (forcibly, in the case of the colonial boundary-drawing in the scramble for Africa and other colonized regions), culminating in The United Nations, and so on. Scholars critique the coherence of those colonial boundaries, the forms of colonial governance imposed inside them (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012; Collier, 2006), and contemporary ill-fitting ‘rogue’ variants of this state formation, but always from the standpoint of whether they prevent achievement of the ‘modern’ norm they locate in the North Atlantic realm. Yet variegated state formations preceded colonialism, of course, across what came to be the Third World. Were these simply erased, producing European-style putatively democratic capitalist nation-states everywhere, or is there a greater variegation here that our theoretical lenses make invisible (cf. Gibson-Graham, 1996)? Can the contemporary Chinese state (a legacy of imperial China, inflected by Marxism/Leninism) be reduced to a variation on the Westphalian model? What about the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS)? To the extent that the answer to such questions is negative, other trajectories of state–economy relations become visible that exceed Mann’s Hegel/Keynes narrative.

When it comes to civil society and the supposed incoherence of the masses, the Hegelian/Keynesian solution also presupposes the territorial spatiality of Westphalian nation-states, with their norms of sovereignty, belonging (citizenship, immigration), bureaucracies, police powers, and representative democracy. In the world system that colonialism catalyzed, this spatiality is too limiting. The capitalist processes producing inequality, poverty and unemployment transcend nation-state boundaries, as do the alienations and contestations they trigger. Westphalian nation-states cannot contain such contestations (e.g. the World Social Forum), and there is little evidence of state-like expertise being scaled up to a global polity with the potential to save global capitalism from itself (consider the intransigent Kyoto or Doha Round negotiations).

This makes visible the limitations of a Hegelian/Keynesian skepticism about the limits of civil society and representative democracy, ‘because faith in democracy is premised on the proposition that civil society … can conceive the answers to its own problems’ (Mann, p. 124). Skepticism about ‘civil society’s … inability to self-regulate’ (Mann, p. 10) resonates with Hardin’s dismissal of the commons or Olsen’s of collective action (Hardin, 1968; Olson, 2009). Yet it is well-known that common property regimes can function effectively, insights that can be transferred to this political debate. Other conceptions of democracy—direct, agonistic, and so on—are being experimented with at various scales (e.g. Barnett, 2012; Mouffe, 1999; Santos, 2005). Of course civil society is replete with difference and antagonism, generative of multiple intersectional splits on the basis of interests and identities, but are the only alternatives the Keynesian ones of chaos versus the state? There are possibilities within civil society for transversal politics and agonistic pragmatism—possibilities that are productive of disruptive spatialities (Leitner, Sheppard and Sziarto, 2008), and these inevitably also engage, hopefully self-critically, with state powers (Barnett and Bridge, 2013; Peck et al., 2014; Yuval-Davis, 1999). As we get further away from the conceptual and geographical space of Hegel/Keynes, such alternatives become more evident, but also perhaps potentially more productive.

What does all this imply for Mann’s analysis? I have no clever answers, but a sneaking suspicion that opening up his implicit territorialized geographical imaginary to other spatialities has troubling effects. Not the least of these is forcing open different kinds of questions about revolution for us middle-class White radical geographers to reflect on.