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Critical scholars of publicity have found in the language of affective publics a helpful framework for theorizing the embodied and processual dimensions of rhetorical worldmaking. Building on Michael Warner’s claim that publics are produced out of stranger relationality and shared attention to circulating textual fragments (67), scholars have advanced a conception of publicity as affective circulation that emerges out of the “temporal, historical, and lived fluxes” of material existence (Edbauer 9). Drawing on a range of approaches, from psychoanalytic theories of affect’s tropological economies (Lundberg) and new materialism (Gries) to the vocabularies of affective economy and public feeling theorized by feminist and queer theory scholars (Cisneros; Edbauer; Johnson; Rand), critical scholars of publicity have produced a powerful account of the ways that shared affects produce “bod[ies] and [their] boundaries” along with relationships between bodies, via their circulation “within, alongside, and outside of power, ideology, and discourse” (Johnson 14). While critical scholars of publicity have turned to affect for many reasons, one key reason concerns affect’s role in the reproduction of capitalism. Many of the theorists that first informed rhetoric’s turn to affective publics have pointed out that felt investments in certain forms of relation and community emerge as accumulations of “affective value” that mimic the circulation of commodities, and that are naturalized through the erasure of the sedimented histories that produce specific patterns of affective circulation (Ahmed 11, 45; Chaput, “Overdetermination”). Rhetorical scholars of publicity have drawn on these insights to argue that the possibilities of collective decision-making under neoliberalism are shaped by “bodily dispositions” that prime individuals to assume forms of subjectivity and shared affect conducive to the reproduction of capital, constraining “what individuals are and are not capable of as public subjects” (Chaput, “Attunement” 182; Greene). An example of this conditioning is capital’s increasing reliance on “affective labor,” which includes cultural labor associated with the entertainment industries and digital economy, as well as service industry work requiring emotional performance and self-management, and the unpaid reproductive labor associated with the mainte- nance of emotional relationships in domestic spaces, workplace environments, and immediate social connection (Bruce and Homan). Broader scholarship on affective publics and scholarship dealing with the affective nature of capitalist reproduction both suggest intimacy as a useful concept for staging a conversation between publicity and the common. Rhetorical scholars who have engaged with the common to a greater or lesser degree have highlighted the ontological “affectability” (Davis 195, original emphasis) that provides the conditions of possibility for rhetorical existence-in-common, includ- ing public deliberation and action. At the same time, as scholars like Rice and Johnson insist, the porosity of bodily boundaries entailed by affect theory is also entangled with the “structures of feeling that shape the social field” (Edbauer 10). Such bodily boundaries are “produced” through socially mediated power dynamics, rendering “some bodies” such as “those of queer and trans folks, people of color, women, and especially the intersections thereof” as “more porous,” hence more precarious and vulnerable, than others (Johnson 5). As a form of affective relation that is crucial to securing investments in particular forms of collective life, intimacy is a productive analytic for considering the power dynamics that inform affective publicity, especially the collec- tive investments and divestments that reproduce patterns of racialized and gendered violence (Mack and McCann 336–38). Intimacy also makes clear the ways that publicity can be said to draw on a generalized affectability expressed by the concept of the common, without holding the common up as a “reparative” fantasy (Berlant, Inconvenience 111) that need merely be affirmed to address systemic oppression. The ways that structural power dynamics shape publicity have been a topic of wide conversation among rhetorical scholars, many of whom have drawn attention to affect and bodily experience as a part of these dynamics (e.g., Asen and Brouwer; Foust et al.; on affect see Bruce and Homan; Chávez; Johnson). Staging a conversation between publicity and the common through a rhetorical theory of intimacy expands scholarly accounts of capitalism as a structural factor in the oppressive nature of dominant forms of publicity by considering how capitalism both produces and “tries to curtail” certain “public goods and public powers” (Fraser xiv) through enclosures of the common that coincide with the production of normative forms of intimacy. Moreover, where literature on capitalism and affect (especially that centered on digital or informational labor) has been taken to task for being insuffi- ciently attentive to the racialized and gendered “exploitation of bodies and environments” (Bruce and Homan 229), our focus on intimacy centers a perspective on capitalism as a social order that gains power by dispossessing the intimate relationships that reproduce existence-in-common, including care work, the “energy and creativity of working people,” and wealth extracted from “nature and subject peoples” (Fraser xiv). If normative forms of intimacy provide the “enabling conditions” for capitalist economic produc- tion in the form of unwaged reproductive labor (Fraser 145), then those who would contest capitalist reproduction should seek to organize intimacy along “nonreproductive” lines that aid in surviving crises and orient intimacy toward alternative futurities (Berlant, Inconvenience 28). Such forms of counterintimacy can be a strategy for publics and counterpublics that seek to “affirm and bolster multiplicity” (Asen, “Neoliberalism” 335) against neoliberalism and the historical patterns of enclo- sure it perpetuates. Moreover, when oriented around the figure of the common, counterintimacies advance publics scholarship focused on affirming counterpublic multiplicity by theorizing the ways that solidarities between different counterpublic groups might emerge through the hard work of negotiating the “converging and competing intensities, junctures and crises” produced by different forms of identity and oppression (Rowe 40–42; see also Chávez 41–46). As recent theorists of publicity’s relationship to capital would have it, such solidarities are the site of “boundary struggles” that contest the “structural divisions that have historically constituted capitalist societies” (Fraser 26). Such a perspective suggests a turn from “the common” as ontological backdrop or utopian fantasy to commoning as a social activity that can produce forms of solidarity and collective existence. In the next two sections, we expand on these claims along two lines of thought. The next section discusses the history of enclosures as a context that is both antecedent to, and productive of, neoliberalism’s attack on public life. The following section discusses the value of counterintimacies for resisting capitalist enclosure.

Conclusion The case for Universal Basic Services made here is one part, but an essential part, of a rejection of turbo consumer capitalism and a renewal of social citizenship: a shift from customers and consumers to residents and citizens. To achieve this will require a resolute confrontation with the ontology and morality of the current economic model. The ontological ground is the existence of core human needs that require collective responsibilities and a renewed foundational economy to fulfill. The normative justification is the superior potential of UBS to secure human flourishing via greater equality, efficiency, collective solidarity and long-term sustainability. The political argument is that the implementation of Universal Basic Services can achieve results that are superior to a system of unconditional cash payments (a UBI scheme) coupled with markets for commodified services. Of course this leaves open the question, why not advocate both UBI and UBS? There is not the space here to confront that question properly, but it embraces consequential and ethical arguments. A universal unconditional living income would require punitive levels of taxation. By focussing wholly on individual income, UBI would threaten public provision of collective consumption, which of course is why many on the libertarian right support it. UBS is fiscally more modest and discriminatory. Common human needs recognise the social foundations of life and the role of contribution to a collective cause: ‘from each according to their ability’ as a well as ‘to each according to their needs’. In this and other ways, UBS embodies quite distinct—and I would argue ethically superior—ideas of economy, society, sustainability and social solidarity.

3. The Role of Social Policy at the Collective Level: Establishing the Social Preconditions of Democracy

One important reason for interpreting capability narrowly as the capacity to participate in the economy through employment lies in the fact that this interpretation allows to reframe social policy as an “investment.” Hence, while at the individual level the employment-focused paradigm is justified in terms of empowerment, at the collective level it is legitimized through its contribution to economic growth. Social policies promoting individuals’ participation in the economy are thus praised for being able to reconcile social and economic goals (Hemerijck Citation2013, 134) whereas, not surprisingly, the emphasis on unpaid care work and political participation is much less strong: these activities have no or very little economic return. Yet, from a capability perspective, justifying social policy in terms of economic growth appears difficult. Indeed, one of the central normative concern of capability theorists has been precisely that of challenging the appropriateness of economic growth as a measure of social wellbeing, arguing that it treats a means—and not even a very good means (Crocker Citation1992, 585)—as if it was an end in itself (e.g. Sen Citation1999). This is not to say that economic progress is unimportant. However, there is no automatic link between economic growth and social wellbeing. For example, higher economic growth does not necessarily imply a better healthcare or education system and indeed national rankings based on the Human Development Index are not the same as those based on GDP (Nussbaum Citation2011, 48).

2. The Role of Social Policy at the Individual Level: Expanding Agency Beyond and Through Employment

Like the employment-focused paradigm, a capability-enhancing social policy is concerned with life chances rather than only with access to commodities. For example, a capability-enhancing social policy for unemployed people cannot consist simply in offering them welfare benefits since unemployment has negative non-monetary consequences, such as not having a fulfilling occupation (Sen Citation1997, 156). However, with its focus on people’s substantive freedom to choose among various beings and doings, a capability-informed social policy is both broader and more demanding than the employment-focused paradigm. First, a capability-enhancing social policy is broader than the employment-focused paradigm because it allows the expression of human agency in forms beyond paid work, including care work and political participation (Bonvin and Laruffa Citation2018a). Second, it is more demanding not only because if a person decides to engage in paid work, this choice in order to be a free choice should be more than simply determined by the lack of alternatives for obtaining the means of survival but also because employment itself should be a capability-enhancing activity. I now analyse these two arguments in further details.

Redistribution and reduction of commodified productivist work also enables fairer sharing of decommodified social reproduction, itself a necessary dimension of post-growth. Earlier discussion of feminist social policy drew attention to the need to advance a ‘reproductive economy of care’ in a degrowth context which necessitates revaluing paid and unpaid work (Nierling, ), as well as restructuring of and reduction in working time to decrease stress, increase gender equality in working time, and facilitate the achievement of work–life balance, as well as greater ecological sustainability. A post-growth and feminist informed care ethic understands care as ‘a species activity’ and includes care for ‘our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web’ (Fisher and Tronto, :). Proposals for decommodification that speak directly to redistribution of care and paid work include shorter working weeks, long part time hours      .  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279422000150 Published online by Cambridge University Press ( per week) and three-quarter working time arrangements. Many countries, led by the Nordic states, are actively experimenting with parental and paternity leave policies that enable a shift from adult-worker regimes to a more decommodified post-growth distribution of care and work or ’universal care giver’ regimes, where both care and paid work are more equally shared within households (Folbre : ). In  Ireland’s Citizen’s Assembly on Gender Equality recommended such a combination of care policies. Decommodification in a post-growth and post-productivist world also requires redistribution of work across the life course. Policies and debates about raising the pension age, ‘the commodification of life’s time’ (Biggs et al., ), are common across the OECD. Shifting from a productivist approach points towards policies that enable earlier retirement and deco modifies pensions, disentangling them from commodified work (as in the New Zealand Superannuation). Biggs et al. () address decommodification and sustainability from the perspective of aging, arguing against ‘productive ageing’ and ‘commodity consumption’ that denies older people alternative personal, bodily and psychosocial elements of a ‘long life’. Choice in retirement refers not only to retirement age, which averages  in  but is projected to rise to  within  years (OECD, ); flexibility and choice requires access to retirement income and universal care services. Valuing the decommodified, post-productivist contributions people can make to sustainability is key to enabling generational relationships evolve in a complementary sustainable rather than competitive framework. Repurposing of active labour market measures Over the last forty years many OECD countries experienced a shift from passive to active social policy where work-first conditional activation regimes commodified income support. Shifting the present focus of activation policy is a key requirement for a shift to a decommodified, post-growth and postproductivist world. Brodkin and Marston () understand activation as a combination of enabling, compensatory and regulatory policies that in the contemporary context amount to a workfare project which seeks to commodify people in low paid precarious labour. Decommodification requires a reorientation of such policy and institutions to focus on enabling functions, enhancing capability so citizens can transition at different stages in their life cycle, and seeing work as a form of social participation (Jackson, ). Activation policy has been widely critiqued for its failure to generate sustainable, good quality employment, especially for the more vulnerable (Brodkin and Marston, ). Both public employment services (PES) and active labour market programmes (ALMPs) can support new forms and patterns of participation including decently paid labour market participation, but also other forms of sustainability enhancing participation, which could work in conjunction with -, -    https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279422000150 Published online by Cambridge University Press PI and UBS as already discussed. Activation policy and practice can be resituated in a voluntary decommodified PES focused on promoting a broader navigational agency for active citizenship (Claassen, ). This is the focus of active experimentation in the Netherlands Participation Act and in local experiments in Denmark and Scotland (Larruffa et al., ), where processes of co-production enable welfare claimants to identify and take up forms of socially valuable participation. Rethinking the aims and value of ALMPs from an ecosocial perspective – that is, valuing and designing activation policy around ecological and social goals – speaks to how various countries have historically used ALMP to promote non-labour market objectives, and how some are consciously widening what is seen as acceptable forms of activity in contemporary ALMPs (Dukelow, forthcoming). Stamm et al. () find examples in Finland, Germany, Belgium and Italy of ‘ecosocial innovation’; activation projects that support local communities, and are of clear holistic benefit to participants and the environment. Swaton () describes as ‘ecological citizenship’ the use of labour market programmes in France to meet ecological objectives. In Ireland aspects of activation policy had clear roots in the social economy, social cohesion and local communities, and such ALMPs have supported ecological participation. Across Europe such existing ideas, instruments and programmes ‘hiding in plain sight’ can be integrated into a new understanding of ecosocial welfare policy. These programmes offer modest but clear starting points to reconfigure social policy towards new forms of active citizenship in an ecosocial model of activation, and for providing vital care, ecological and community services.

17 Sustainability One of the particular weaknesses of much public policy is short-termism: taking little account of how major drivers of social, economic and environmental transformation will remould the way the satisfaction of needs is experienced and the resources available to meet them. Yet, public services have a greater potential to pursue sustainability goals than programmes to disburse funds for consumer expenditure. In particular, they could play a greater role in prevention: ‘action to reduce the probability of a risk occurring’. The case for preventive public policy is essentially twofold: it is better for human wellbeing to prevent harm than to deal with its consequences, and it promises financial savings to expensive and hard-pressed welfare states.18 This is most apparent in facing the most profound, indeed existential, threat to contemporary public policy—climate collapse and extreme environmental stress. The urgent necessity to move away from unsustainable economic, social and environmental practices provides a novel justification for extending universal public services, in three directions.19 First, public provision of services strengthens the capacity of communities to adapt to or cope with severe climatic and environmental stress. The impact of Hurricane Katrina on the poor and black populations of New Orleans (in contrast to the population of Cuba, affected by the same hurricane) demonstrated the importance of collective services. Second, public services can play a vital role in decarbonising the economy in a just way. For example, Green New Deal programmes to retrofit the vast bulk of the housing stock will require public planning, finance and management. They will be needed to ensure a ‘just transition’ to lower carbon living, not simply a green capitalist transition that will load costs onto the poorest people and communities. Third, UBS can play a vital role in switching the entire economy from an obsession with growth to a concern for human wellbeing within planetary limits. Public provisioning systems for healthcare and education are better able than market systems to promote sustainable consumption, to implement national strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to coordinate sustainable practices such as active travel and local food procurement. For example, the mainly privately funded US healthcare system directly accounts for 8 per cent of emissions in the US, compared with 3 per cent of UK emissions directly stemming from the NHS. This is due both to the greater macro-efficiency and lower expenditure shares of health in the UK, and to lower emissions per pound or dollar spent, presumably as a result of better allocation of resources and procurement practices. There is some cross-national evidence that more extensive and generous welfare states are better suited to adopting and implementing pro-environmental policies, especially where they U NIVERSAL B ASIC S ERVICES 7 © The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019 The Political Quarterly embody ideas about shared needs and collective responsibilities.20

Solidarity The concepts of shared needs and collective responsibilities embody the idea of solidarity, and the practice of UBS has the potential to develop and strengthen solidarity. Here we take solidarity to mean feelings of sympathy and responsibility between people that promote mutual support. It is an inclusive process, not just within well-acquainted groups but also, crucially, between people who are ‘strangers’ to each other. It involves collective action towards shared objectives.15 There is a growing literature on the ways in which neoliberal capitalism, based on individualism, choice and competition, weakens the values of social citizenship and undermines solidarity. UBS calls for collective policy and practice: sharing resources and acting together to deal with risks and problems that people cannot cope with alone. It is not something that can be achieved by individuals or groups simply fending for themselves and pursuing their own interests. This is reflected, for example, in the EU’s long-standing goal of economic and social ‘cohesion’: combining a free market economy with ‘a commitment to the values of internal solidarity and mutual support which ensures open access for all members of society to services of general benefit and protection’. In the same spirit, the Fabian Society has argued that ending poverty requires a ‘solidarity settlement’ that would profoundly reshape the welfare system by enshrining ‘equal citizenship’ and fostering ‘a sense of mutual interdependence’. 16 Some have argued that public services ‘crowd out’ social capital by inhibiting informal caring networks, mutual trust and social norms that favour civil commitment and trustworthiness. However, evidence contradicts this hypothesis, finding instead that Nordicstyle welfare regimes, where there are more universal services, tend to have higher levels of bonding and bridging social capital.

Efficiency The argument that markets enhance productive efficiency is well known and valid for many types of goods and services. The dominant argument in economic theory accuses public services of inefficiency, due to lack of competition coupled with the vested interests of bureaucrats and professions. These alleged shortcomings were used to justify introducing market rules into public services from the 1980s onwards. Yet the obverse failures of unregulated economic markets to satisfy consumer wants are also well known, and include tendencies to monopoly, the inability of markets to supply public goods, the self-defeating production of positional goods, and the inefficiency or ‘diswelfares’ caused by meeting wants in commodified forms. Transaction costs are often higher for both consumers and providers: the search costs for customers of comparing different pension or utility providers, the administrative costs of drawing up appropriate contracts, the policing and enforcement costs of monitoring large private companies such as Serco and G4S. Several sectors of the material foundational economy, notably the networked sectors, have large economies of scale, meaning they are ‘natural monopolies’. Moral hazards are encountered when profit incentives combine with unequal knowledge in markets. Competition between multiple providers, customer choice for service users and conventional cost-efficiency criteria for measuring success have largely failed to improve social outputs, let alone social outcomes. There are further advantages to a public— rather than market-based—system of service provision. Where efficiency is assessed in narrow output terms, calculations overlook the multiple dimensions of value, the many ways in which value is experienced and how it accrues. The concept of ‘social return on investment’ (SROI) has been developed over the last decade and adopted by government in the 2012 Social Value Act, which instructs public service commissioners to consider how to ‘improve the social, economic and environmental well-being of the relevant area’. Applying social value analysis to an assessment of service efficiency means taking account of longer-term and indirect effects, as well as shorter-term, direct ones. This does not sit easily with a market-based system. If staff delivering meals to people who are housebound take the time to sit and chat with them, this may reduce their sense of social isolation and generally improve their wellbeing, but it will increase costs by demanding additional staff time.

Abstract The case for Universal Basic Services (UBS) is a recent idea that is attracting much attention. This article provides a theoretical justification for extending the delivery of public services, as an alternative to the longer-standing argument for Universal Basic Income (UBI). It rests on human need theory and the concept of provisioning systems. Both recognise the irreducible heterogeneity of consumption, the multi-faceted nature of human needs and the variety of systems on which we all depend. Both recognise the importance of shared systems and mutual benefits. The final part restates the case for social rights or entitlements to the satisfaction of basic needs and for collective responsibilities to meet them to serve the values of equality, efficiency, solidarity and sustainability. Keywords: human needs, provisioning systems, foundational economy, social entitlements, collective responsibility, solidarity Introduction THE EXTENDED crisis of what we can still call the welfare state has provoked proposals for radical, encompassing reform. The gap between the rich and poor is widening, children go to school hungry and dirty, and life expectancy rates are beginning to fall. More people are in work, but work doesn’t pay and the so-called ‘social security’ system provides nothing of the sort. Since the financial crash, alternatives have increasingly encompassed economic restructuring. Following growing awareness of the climate crisis, some also include radical environmental reform. The present predicament can be summarised as fragmented and degraded welfare, plus financialised, short termist and unsustainable capitalism. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is perhaps the most all-embracing radical alternative. UBI has become increasingly popular on the left, right and centre as a unitary solution to the social and economic fractures and failures in modern society. According to the Compass group, ‘There is no single silver bullet policy to create a Good Society—but basic income is the closest there is’. 1 But it has also attracted growing criticism, both normative and pragmatic.2 I share many of the critiques but I do not rehearse them here. Instead I develop the case for an alternative —Universal Basic Services (UBS). The idea of UBS was originally developed by the Institute for Global Prosperity in 2017.3 It proposed a wider range of free public services that enable every citizen to live a larger life by ensuring access to certain levels of security, opportunity and participation. Here, services mean collectively generated activities that serve the public interest; basic means essential and sufficient rather than minimal, enabling people to flourish and participate in society; and universal means that everyone is entitled to services that meet their needs, regardless of ability to pay. The existing National Health Service (NHS) and state education are obvious examples. The original proposal for UBS advocated an extension of this model of provision to—at least—shelter, nutrition, transport and information. Yet money is fungible, so government money transfers including UBI permit people to spend income on whatever they want. Public services are not fungible, but deliver specific activities or provisions. UBS is less in tune with market ideology than UBI. Unless a robust justification is spelt out, the case for UBS will be continually undermined by appeals to respect consumer sovereignty and market democracy. The purpose of this paper is to ground the case for UBS in a broader conceptual and moral framework. The argument is in three parts. The first sets out a theory of the common human needs we all share and the satisfaction of which is necessary for a flourishing life. The second develops the idea of the ‘foundational economy’ as a provisioning system for meeting these needs. The final part restates the case for social rights or entitlements to the satisfaction of basic needs and for collective responsibilities to meet them. It makes the case for public provision across four goals: equality, efficiency, solidarity and sustainability. [continued] Collective responsibilities and social entitlements The essential argument for public provision of some kind is that markets and charity cannot guarantee the meeting of needs. Only public authority can provide equitable entitlements to need satisfiers. Since the Second World War, universal needs have provided an essential grounding for appeals to social rights: moral or legal claims possessed by ‘right-bearers’ that corresponding ‘duty-bearers’ must take seriously. It is usual here to distinguish ‘negative’ civil and political rights from ‘positive’ socio-economic rights. The former entail a duty of forbearance and protection, for example, rights to freedom of expression and against discrimination; the latter entail a duty of assistance and provision, for example, rights to education or healthcare. Both sets of rights can be traced back to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and have been elaborated and further specified since then. In the West, social rights have provided a fundamental moral argument for welfare states that recognise collective obligations to meet the basic needs of citizens for health, care, education, a minimum income and so on. Though they are subject to constant critiques and counter-movements, there is within them an enduring (if attenuated) sense of social obligation to meet the ‘needs of strangers’, whose unmet needs we do not directly witness and can do nothing individually to satisfy. At present these obligations end at national borders. Large flows of refugees and economic migrants are today questioning who counts as ‘strangers’ and placing new strains on national welfare systems. A process is underway to reimagine social citizenship, based on plural identities and rights conferred on residents rather than on passport holders. Social citizenship is anchored in both ethical and practical considerations. There is a moral dialectic in the ascription of rights and obligations. It is inconsistent to ascribe rights to persons in a social group without also ascribing responsibilities, duties or obligations to group members for realising those rights. And it is inconsistent to ascribe responsibilities to an individual or group without ensuring that they have the wherewithal to discharge them. Feminist revisions of the relationship between needs and obligations have recognised that people are vulnerable as well as capable. Dependence on others is a normal part of everyday life, so for significant periods we must depend on others to provide for us, as we must for them. Caring is the process of ‘responding to another’s needs by understanding their self-determined ends, adopting those ends as one’s own, and advancing them in an effort to cultivate, maintain, or restore their agency’. 13 Obligations thus involve not only avoidance from harm, but also the promotion of capacities for autonomy and self-determination. The argument thus far is that there exist a number of intrinsic, non-substitutable needs that have a high moral claim to satisfaction and that should be guaranteed to strangers via social rights of citizenship and residence. The guarantee of entitlements need not entail direct provision of services by state agencies. Indeed, since 1980 this system has been broken up in three main ways: non-state providers have been encouraged (both for-profit and not-for-profit), non-state sources of funds expanded, and decisions about what, how much and how to provide have been devolved to intermediate organisations or to end users. At the same time, much of the foundational economy, like energy, water, telecommunications and public transport, has been extensively privatised and outsourced. Much of this needs to be reversed to achieve UBS, but that does not require a return to a ‘pure public’ model. Entitlements to UBS can also be guaranteed using a menu of interventions, including regulation, standard setting and monitoring, taxation and subsidies. But the unifying proposal is to advocate directly collective solutions, as opposed to providing income support and leaving provisioning to market forces. To develop this argument the case for collective provision to meet needs can be made on four main grounds: equity, efficiency, solidarity, and sustainability. U NIVERSAL B ASIC S ERVICES 5 © The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019 The Political Quarterly Equity and the ‘social wage’ The value of free and accessible public services to the individual recipient is frequently called the ‘social wage’ because it replaces costs that the individual would otherwise have to pay for out of personal income. In the absence of public provision, for individuals on low incomes, meeting basic needs is likely to consume the majority of their income. If not, basic needs go unmet, leading to both individual and social costs. If bought on the market, these goods and services take up a larger share of household income as we descend the income scale. This is a major argument for free public provision of necessities financed from taxation. Even if the total tax system of a country is broadly proportional to income, as is the current UK tax system, the overall result will be progressive—the relative size of net income plus services will increase as we descend the income scale. On average, in OECD countries, existing public services are worth the equivalent of a huge 76 per cent of the post-tax income of the poorest group compared with just 14 per cent of the richest. Public services reduce income inequality in OECD countries by an average of 20 per cent.14 Free provision of necessities automatically targets lower income households, without the disincentive effects that often result from money transfers. Allocation according to need and citizenship, not market demand, automatically serves redistributive social goals.

This does not preclude the possibility of market provision, although several arguments have been advanced as to why public provision is preferable for reasons of equity, efficiency, solidarity, and sustainability (Gough, 2019: 538–541; Coote and Percy, 2020: 32–56). This has led to the development of the concept of Universal Basic Services (UBS) as a way to move from reliance on ‘the neoliberal formula of individualised consumption within a market-based system’ (Coote and Percy, 2020: 7–8) towards a system of collective mutual interdependence through ‘sharing resources and acting together’ (Gough, 2019: 540). Coote and Percy conceive of UBS as a ‘virtual income of public services’ (2020: 3) that contributes to de-commodification by reducing people’s reliance on the market to meet essential needs. Gough argues that this in turn promotes equality since, ‘in the absence of public provision’, people on low incomes would need to spend ‘the majority of their income’ on meeting basic needs (2019: 539). Moreover, public provisioning systems may be better equipped than market systems to promote sustainable consumption and to meet needs through ‘less carbon intensive’ production, especially when anchored in localised, communal supply chains (Sayer, 2019: 45). At the heart of the concept of UBS is a mission to transform the way services are provided, to put people in control, and to build a new role for the state. Coote and Percy offer a framework that provides a set of guiding principles, and an evidence-based rationale, to prove that collective provision yields far better results than market transactions in terms of equity, efficiency, solidarity and sustainability. They offer not a guidebook, but principles or features; access to services that meet one’s needs as a matter of right, citizen participation so that services are ‘controlled by the people who need and use them’ (Coote and Percy, 2020: 5), and diverse models of ownership. The Michael McGann and Mary P. Murphy 20 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746421000397 Published online by Cambridge University Press state retains responsibility for ensuring equal access, collecting and distributing resources, setting and enforcing quality standards and co-ordinating services across different areas of need. Thus, the concept of UBS synergises with the concept of a foundational economy and its focus on the collective and ecological provision of services (Coote, 2000). This idea of a foundational economy of UBS recovers the importance of welfare states in securing the conditions for collective wellbeing, although Coote and Percy are careful to point out that some needs may continue to be provided for via the market and that UBS should be ‘supported rather than always directly provided by the state’ (2020: 5). Moreover, in a recent extension of their work, Coote (Coote, A, n.d.) argues that UBS requires not just the provision of services but also ‘an income guarantee to ensure that everyone has sufficient disposable cash’. The more UBS are realised through market rather than public provision the higher this income guarantee will need to be. Nonetheless, even in the context of widespread public provision, people will still need some level of disposable income if they are to enjoy central capabilities for play, senses, imagination and thought, and so on that are connected to the pursuit of varying life plans and exercise of agency and choice. Consequently, as Coote and Lawson (2021) argue, income supports and UBS are best thought of ‘as two sides of the same coin’ rather than conflicting alternatives

By reimagining the functions of the components of pop music, Charli XCX undermines the purported identity between compositional placement and function. Heard in conjunction with the percussive synths, the flat credo of performed confidence – “Let’s ride” – forms an aesthetic alliance with McKenzie Wark and her noting that “Perhaps what is pretty is instead displacing this whole idea of appearances as a cover for some essence. Perhaps what is pretty need not be seen as hiding something, as damaged goods, but as a gift, as offering the possibility of stepping outside of exchange value.” “Pretty” is an aesthetic that does not set out to hide anything.

This is possibly quite counterintuitive. Interpretation of music is, generally, guided towards determining meanings and relations of a composition, of investigating what the sounds point towards that lies beyond its brute presentation, what emotions a melody might be connected to, how lyrics are manifested in sounds, sounds in lyrics etc. By introducing exchange value as a mode of aesthetic engagement, Wark identifies both the trouble and the political potential of “Pretty”, an analysis much interesting in the case of “Vroom Vroom”.

The question that lingers now is: what then? How do we actually engage with “Vroom Vroom” outside this persistent and oppressive logic? What is it that actually becomes accessible when assuming these tracks to be hiding nothing? As for now, the pretty might appear completely flat, any musical gesture could be any other when the preclusion is successful. By turning to a specific contemporary account of nihilism, we might find a beginning to an answer that does not fall prey of a flat and stale musical ontology.

In Nihil Unbound (2007, chap 7), Ray Brassier poses a determining question to the long tradition of nihilism: how can nihilism hold the world to be devoid of anything to believe in and still believe in this negation? By holding on to the belief this becomes a reprise of how unbearable the world would be without belief. In one of the notorious accounts of nihilism, the Nietzschean, the point-zero meaninglessness becomes a site of existential determination through “eternal recurrence” and affirmation of “joy” and “will to power”. Such a nihilism seems, perhaps counterintuitively, more geared towards saving the human from meaninglessness, than accepting it. Brassier resolves this by considering the world and its philosophies as being grounded on not the negation of meaning and life, but the assertion of non-meaning and non-life. This is, thus, not an attempt to save the world, its life and philosophies from the “threat” of nihilism but uses nihilism to shape a “speculative opportunity” that arises when the world is no longer seen as founded on life or philosophical vitalism. When rejecting the exceptionality of life, the attempt of recuperating something humanly exceptional from the nihilist point zero is not needed. Any politico-philosophical landscape would be significantly rebuilt if we were to lose the idea that some kind of life or meaning is the driving force in the world (Nihil Unbound, 2007, p. xi).

Combining the argument on meaningful work with the “ethics of care” and the capability approach, work could be redefined as the “practice of taking care of the world” and this capability for caring could be placed at the heart of capability-oriented public action (Laruffa, 2021). Indeed, this allows reformulating the capability approach in line with the feminist and ecological concerns discussed in the previous section: rather than accepting the capitalist interpretation of work as a marketable commodity, the capability approach would thus embrace a broader and deeper understanding of work, including all meaningful and life-sustaining activities undertaken to care for people and the planet and shifting the focus of public action from economic production to social reproduction. Moreover, the capability to take care of the world presupposes the freedom to participate in the democratic debate on what is worthy of care, i.e. what is meaningful and valuable. In this way, re-defining work as “the practice of taking care of the world” includes both the subjective and the objective dimension of meaningfulness. Moreover, this broad definition of work encompasses important activities beyond employment, thereby pluralizing the possible forms of valuable work and thus increasing individuals’ freedom to flourish and to choose the activities they value most. In doing so, this conceptualization also encourages individuals to engage in meaningful activities that are urgently needed from the societal and environmental viewpoint and that are in shortage under neoliberal capitalism. Thus, the goal of public policies should be to align, as far as possible, the objective and the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, creating “opportunities for personally capability-enhancing labour that is also socially capability-enhancing” (Bueno 2021, p. 14). Finally, this re-conceptualization of work requires a democratic debate on the precise meaning of “caring for the world,” thereby encouraging processes of democratization and becoming itself a source of democratic renewal.

In the context of this democratic debate on the nature of social wellbeing, a capability- oriented social citizenship assigns a key role to progressive intellectuals and academics. Social policy scholars in mainstream “positivistic” approaches often act as “experts,” prescribing policy solutions and welfare reform proposals in a top-down and technocratic manner based on “scientific evidence.” In contrast, the capability approach calls for the democratization of the production of the knowledge informing public action (Bifulco, 2017; Borghi, 2018; de Leonardis et al., 2012; Salais, 2009). In this vein, the approach developed in this paper recognizes the social construction of possible futures and argues for democratizing the debate on the future of society. In acknowledging that this process of social construction, which establishes what counts as a realistic or desirable future, is marked by deep inequalities in the power of aspiring, planning and effectively realizing those possible futures (de Leonardis & Deriu, 2012), progressive social policy scholars act less as experts and more like Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals” who engage with various groups and associations within civil society to promote transformative and emancipatory social change. In particular, building on Gramsci’s work, Sen (2009) argues that progressive intellectuals are called to adhere to established and anchored ideas of justice within the population while at the same time reconstructing and reconfiguring them, with the aim of promoting solidarity. Thus, even if the goal is to change “people’s thinking and priorities” — as it was the case for Gramsci — this still requires “an engagement with the shared mode of thinking and acting” (Sen, 2009, p. 121). This is “a kind of a dual task, using language and imagery that communicate efficiently and well through the use of conformist rules, while trying to make this language express nonconformist proposals” (Sen, 2009, p. 122).

All the trade, all the integration we've been enjoying for the past, I don't know, decade, couple decades is maybe going down the tubes. We'll talk about famines that could be caused by the inability to get fertilizer and other agricultural inputs, raw materials for food production. This is going to leave many countries unable to produce goods for themselves, let alone for export. So a lot of what we see today with countries being interconnected and working together to specialize, that apparently according to Peter is going to decouple and that system will indeed crumble and we cover a lot in this episode from trade and economics to shipping, to demographic collapse, to petroleum, China, green energy batteries, and more. We had some audio issues with this one that we tried to fix, but bear with us on this one. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode because we covered a whole lot. All right, here we go with Peter Zeihan. This book, Peter, just full of sunshine and roses, wasn't it? ? Look, it's a great time to be alive, but it's kind of artificial, right? Let's talk about that. I want to talk about one, why it's a great time to be alive because the rest of the episode can be about how this is all falling apart. Peter Zeihan: Yeah, fair enough. It all has to do with globalization. In the world, before World War II, we had an imperial system with the empires, duking it out over access to everything. And trade as a rule needed to be militarized because every time there was a conflict, you would lose access to whatever happened even if you weren't a party to the conflict, a shipping would be a target. Jordan Harbinger: Ah. Peter Zeihan: So at the end of World War II, the Americans who at the only ne Navy left in the game said that they would put their navy at the service of the global commons so that anyone could trade with anyone anywhere at any time and access any market. And we came to know this is free trade in globalization. Now, there are two big implications from that. The first is that we were no longer in a world where if you wanted to be successful, you had to have iron ore and coal and steel and food. You only needed one of them now and you could trade for the other three. And everyone started to industrialize together, starting from different points and moving at different speeds. But we all got on this path that we are all now very familiar with. And second, when people industrialized, they changed their personal habits and national economies evolved as well. So it used to be that you were probably living on a subsistence farm, and when you do that, kids are free labor, so you have a bunch. But when you move into the town to take industrial and services jobs, kids go from being free labor to really expensive habits, and adults aren't stupid. So we had fewer of them. Jordan Harbinger: Fewer kids or fewer expensive habits or are those the same thing? Peter Zeihan: Different expensive habits, fewer kids. Jordan Harbinger: Got it. Peter Zeihan: You play that forward 75 years, and it's not that most of the world is running out of children. That happened 30 years ago. It's that now the world has run out of working-age adults and we're starting to run out of mature adults. Everyone's moving into mass retirement. So from a strategic point of view, globalization was based on America's commitment to the Cold War, which is long since over. Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. Peter Zeihan: And economically the industrialization experience, the urbanization experience has been about this bulge moving through the population structure that started with children, then turned into 20 and 30 somethings that was consumption heavy, then turned into 40 and 50 somethings, which were capital heavy people saving for retirement. And now, they're all moving into retirement. So the whole process has already played out and under globalization, first with a lot of workers and with a lot of capital, we got the technological explosions that we know. But these were all nothing more than a moment in time. A moment that lasted 75 years, but it's now over. And so we now have to go back to what we had before World War II but without people. Jordan Harbinger: That doesn't sound possible. Peter Zeihan: It's not great. Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Yeah. Okay. I was like, what? I'm missing a piece here where this actually can possibly happen without suddenly inventing robots that can replace tons of people overnight that are also affordable. Peter Zeihan: Well, robots wouldn't even solve it because robots don't consume, they can only produce. Jordan Harbinger: Ah, I see. Right, so we could fix half the equation with one miracle, and then we need a different miracle to fix the second half of the equation. Peter Zeihan: We need cloning, low-cost cloning. Jordan Harbinger: Right. You've said the 2020s are going to see a collapse in many categories. Let's explore that because we've spoken before about, not necessarily you and I, but just we as in people can't shut up about how great globalization is. And then we had the pandemic and it was like, oh shoot, globalization, that thing that means we can't get things now. A cargo ship gets stuck in the Suez Canal and suddenly, we realize how fragile this system is. And it sounds so fragile that it's hard to believe how fragile it actually is. And none of us are looking at shipping. I've done shows on shipping and it's the Wild West. Only if things break the entire world is totally screwed. Peter Zeihan: I don't think it's quite that positive. Jordan Harbinger: No, quite that, okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. Peter Zeihan: The key thing to keep in mind for shipping — let me throw it into three general categories. Number one, 80 percent of the stuff that enables people to grow food is transported internationally, whether it's equipment or fertilizer or fuel. Only 20 percent of food is traded internationally, but 80 percent, you need the inputs to grow it in the first place. Number two, roughly half of all oil is shipped on the ocean blue, typically by supertanker, along with everything that comes out of the Persian Gulf. And then number three, safety on the waves is what's allows us to have the East Asian manufacturing model, which is a fancy way of saying the manufacturing model because roughly half of all manufactured goods are produced in East Asia. And you will get components coming from Thailand versus Indonesia versus China versus Korea versus Japan. But the key thing to remember is less than one percent of that shipping happens on land. Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Peter Zeihan: Korea is in effect an island. Japan is an island. Most of the Southeast Asian countries are either islands or peninsulas, and they're ring by mountains. So physical connections, independent of maritime trade in Asia almost don't happen at all. Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So we are totally, totally, totally dependent on these boats, being able to get from one place to another, not get stuck in canals, not get attacked by pirates. Having oil at a decent, somewhat reasonable price to be able to transport other oil and other goods, and also just logistics and other things not getting totally screwed up. And if any one of those things gets out of whack and this ecosystem suddenly Tickle Me, Elmo is not available for Christmas. And there's tears all over the world. Peter Zeihan: Certainly. And you know, the book is about how this happens on a decade's time scale. How the 2020s were always the decade that it was always going to break down in. But events in just the last couple of months are speeding this up. A lot of this is probably going to be front loaded. Well, think of what just happened in the first week of December. So the Europeans announced their plan for an oil export ban, and a lot of the details are being made up as they've gone in. It's a very European policy in that regard, but what it is encouraging is a split in the way we view oil from the Russian space versus the rest of the world and the different types of crude coming out of the Russian space. So the stuff the Europeans are primarily concerned about is Euro's crude that is exported west to the European space, and that can only be sold for $60 or less now, and that's affecting insurance and shipping rates and the type of vessels that go in. And we saw over the course of the last two years how disruptions and simply the type of vessel being available can generate supply chain snarl. So now, we're doing this with energy, but there's also a crude grade that exports to the Pacific that doesn't touch the European space at all that trades differently. We now, just in the Russian space, have two fundamentally different markets, not just for pricing, but for physical accessibility, for the ability to get ships and insurance to allow it to move. One of the reasons why the world has been so stable, air quotes, "stable" since 1945 is there's been one oil price. Now, it's modified by the length of the journey or the quality of the crude, but there's one oil price and everything is safe.

An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the US-backed framework of international order established after World War II is “fraying” and may even be “collapsing,” leading the United States to lose its position of “primacy” in world affairs. The solution proposed to protect US power in this new “post-primacy” environment is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism. The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which US power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling. Having lost its past status of “pre-eminence,” the US now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable “post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is “resistance to authority.” Danger comes not just from great power rivals like Russia and China, both portrayed as rapidly growing threats to American interests, but also from the increasing risk of “Arab Spring”-style events. These will erupt not just in the Middle East, but all over the world, potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for the foreseeable future. The report, based on a year-long intensive research process involving consultation with key agencies across the Department of Defense and US Army, calls for the US government to invest in more surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” US military. The report was published in June by the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute to evaluate the DoD’s approach to risk assessment at all levels of Pentagon policy planning. The study was supported and sponsored by the US Army’s Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Develop­ment; and the Army Study Program Management Office. Collapse “While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” the report laments. “In brief, the sta­tus quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing.” The study’s description of this order subtly recognizes its imperial nature as one underpinned by American dominance, in which the US and its allies literally “dictate” the terms of how the system operates, to further their own interests: The order and its constituent parts, first emerged from World War II, were transformed to a unipolar sys­tem with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and have by-and-large been dominated by the United States and its major Western and Asian allies since. Status quo forces collectively are comfortable with their dominant role in dictating the terms of international security outcomes and resist the emergence of rival centers of power and authority. But this era when the US and its allies could simply get their way is over. Observing that US officials “naturally feel an obligation to preserve the U.S. global position within a favorable international order,” the report concludes that this “rules-based global order that the United States built and sustained for 7 decades is under enormous stress.” The report provides a detailed breakdown of how the DoD perceives this order to be rapidly unravelling, with the Pentagon being increasingly outpaced by world events. Warning that “global events will happen faster than DoD is currently equipped to handle,” the study concludes that the US “can no longer count on the unassailable position of dominance, supremacy, or pre-eminence it enjoyed for the 20-plus years after the fall of the Soviet Union.” So weakened is US power, that it can no longer even “automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” It’s not just US power that is in decline. The US Army War College study concludes that: [A]ll states and traditional political authority structures are under increasing pressure from endogenous and exogenous forces… The fracturing of the post-Cold War global system is accompanied by the in­ternal fraying in the political, social, and economic fabric of practically all states. But, the document says, this should not be seen as defeatism, but rather a “wakeup call.” If nothing is done to adapt to this “post-primacy” environment, the complexity and speed of world events will “increasingly defy [DoD’s] current strategy, planning, and risk assessment conventions and biases.” Defending the “status quo” Top on the list of forces that have knocked the US off its position of global “pre-eminence,” says the report, are the role of competing powers—major rivals like Russia and China, as well as smaller players like Iran and North Korea. The document is particularly candid in setting out why the US sees these countries as threats—not so much because of tangible military or security issues, but mainly because their pursuit of their own legitimate national interests is, in itself, seen as undermining American dominance. Russia and China are described as “revisionist forces” who benefit from the US-dominated international order, but who dare to “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance.” Russia and China, the analysts say, “are engaged in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, will, reach, influence, and impact.” The premise of this conclusion is that the US-backed “status quo” international order is fundamentally “favorable” for the interests of the US and its allies. Any effort to make global order also work “favorably” for anyone else is automatically seen as a threat to US power and interests. Thus, Russia and China “seek to reorder their position in the existing status quo in ways that—at a minimum—create more favorable circumstances for pursuit of their core objectives.” At first glance there seems nothing particularly wrong about this. So the analysts emphasize that “a more maximalist perspective sees them pursuing advantage at the direct expense of the United States and its principal Western and Asian allies.” Most conspicuous of all, there is little substantiation in the document at all of how Russia and China pose a meaningful threat to American national security. The chief challenge is that they “are bent on revising the contemporary status quo” through the use of “gray zone” techniques, involving “means and methods falling far short of unambiguous or open provocation and conflict.” Such “murkier, less obvious forms of state-based aggression,” despite falling short of actual violence, are condemned—but then, losing any sense of moral high-ground, the Pentagon study advocates that the US itself should “go gray or go home” to ensure US influence. The document also sets out the real reasons that the US is hostile to “revolutionary forces” like Iran and North Korea: they pose fundamental obstacles to US imperial influence in those regions. They are: … neither the products of, nor are they satisfied with, the contemporary order… At a minimum, they intend to destroy the reach of the U.S.-led order into what they perceive to be their legitimate sphere of influence. They are also resolved to replace that order locally with a new rule set dictated by them. Far from insisting, as the US government does officially, that Iran and North Korea are threats mainly due to nuclear weapons, the document makes clear that actually they are considered threatening to the expansion of the “U.S.-led order.” Losing the propaganda war Amidst the challenge posed by these competing powers, the Pentagon study emphasizes the threat from non-state forces which are undermining the “U.S.-led order” in different ways, primarily through information. The “hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information, disinformation, and dis­affection,” the study team observes, is leading to the uncontrolled spread of information. The upshot is that the Pentagon faces the “inevitable elimination of secrecy and operational security.” “Wide uncontrolled access to technology that most now take for granted is rapidly undermining prior advantages of discrete, secret, or covert intentions, actions, or operations… In the end, senior defense leaders should assume that all defense-related activity from minor tactical movements to major military operations would occur completely in the open from this point forward.” This information revolution, in turn, is leading to the “generalized disintegra­tion of traditional authority structures… fueled, and/or accelerated by hyperconnectivity and the obvious decay and potential failure of the post-Cold War status quo.” Civil unrest Highlighting the threat posed by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, the study also points to “leaderless instability (e.g., Arab Spring)” as a major driver of “a generalized erosion or dissolution of traditional authority structures.” The document hints that such populist civil unrest is likely to become prominent in Western homelands, including inside the United States. “To date, U.S. strategists have been fixated on this trend in the greater Middle East. However, the same forces at work there are similarly eroding the reach and authority of governments worldwide… it would be unwise not to recognize that they will mutate, metastasize, and manifest differently over time.” The US homeland is flagged-up as being especially vulnerable to the breakdown of “traditional authority structures”: The United States and its population are increasingly exposed to substantial harm and an erosion of security from individuals and small groups of motivated actors, leveraging the conflu­ence of hyperconnectivity, fear, and increased vulner­ability to sow disorder and uncertainty. This intensely disorienting and dislocating form of resistance to author­ity arrives via physical, virtual, and psychological vio­lence and can create effects that appear substantially out of proportion to the origin and physical size or scale of the proximate hazard or threat. There is little reflection, however, on the role of the US government itself in fomenting such endemic distrust, through its own policies. Bad facts Among the most dangerous drivers of this risk of civil unrest and mass destabilization, the document asserts, are different categories of fact. Apart from the obvious “fact-free,” which is defined as information that undermines “objective truth,” the other categories include actual truths that, however, are damaging to America’s global reputation. “Fact-inconvenient” information consists of the exposure of “details that, by implication, un­dermine legitimate authority and erode the relationships between governments and the governed”—in other words, facts that reveal how government policy is corrupt, incompetent or undemocratic. “Fact-perilous” information refers to basically to national security leaks from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning, “exposing highly clas­sified, sensitive, or proprietary information that can be used to accelerate a real loss of tactical, operational, or strategic advantage.” “Fact-toxic” information pertains to actual truths which, the document complains, are “exposed in the absence of context,” and therefore poison “important political discourse.” Such information is seen as being most potent in triggering outbreaks of civil unrest, because it: … fatally weakens foundational security at an international, regional, national, or personal level. Indeed, fact-toxic exposures are those likeliest to trigger viral or contagious insecurity across or within borders and between or among peoples. Mass surveillance and psychological warfare

"The Net is an anarchy." This truism is the core of crypto anarchy. No central control, no ruler, no leader (except by example, reputation), no "laws." No single nation controls the Net, no administrative body sets policy. The Ayatollah in Iran is as powerless to stop a newsgroup--alt.wanted.moslem.women or alt.wanted.moslem.gay come to mind-he doesn't like as the President of France is as powerless to stop, say, the abuse of French in soc.culture.french. Likewise, the CIA can't stop newsgroups, or sites, or Web pages, which give away their secrets. At least not in terms of the Net itself...what non-Net steps might be taken is left as an exercise for the paranoid and the cautious. This essential anarchy is much more common than many think. Anarchy--the absence of a ruler telling one what to do--is common in many walks of life: choice of books to read, movies to see, friends to socialize with, etc. Anarchy does not mean complete freedom--one can, after all, only read the books which someone has written and had published--but it does mean freedom from external coercion. Anarchy as a concept, though, has been tainted by other associations. First, the "anarchy" here is not the anarchy of popular conception: lawlessness, disorder, chaos, and "anarchy." Nor is it the bomb-throwing anarchy of the 19th century "black" anarchists, usually associated with Russia and labor movements. Nor is it the "black flag" anarchy of anarcho-syndicalism and writers such as Proudhon. Rather, the anarchy being spoken of here is the anarchy of "absence of government" (literally, "an arch," without a chief or head). This is the same sense of anarchy used in "anarchocapitalism," the libertarian free market ideology which promotes voluntary, uncoerced economic transactions. [6] I devised the term crypto anarchy as a pun on crypto, meaning "hidden," on the use of "crypto" in combination with political views (as in Gore Vidal's famous charge to William F. Buckley: "You crypto fascist!"), and of course because the technology of crypto makes this form of anarchy possible. The first presentation of this was in a 1988 "Manifesto," whimsically patterned after another famous manifesto. [7] Perhaps a more popularly understandable term, such as "cyber liberty," might have some advantages, but crypto anarchy has its own charm, I think. And anarchy in this sense does not mean local hierarchies don't exist, nor does it mean that no rulers exist. Groups outside the direct control of local governmental authorities may still have leaders, rulers, club presidents, elected bodies, etc. Many will not, though. Politically, virtual communities outside the scope of local governmental control may present problems of law enforcement and tax collection. (Some of us like this aspect.) Avoidance of coerced transactions can mean avoidance of taxes, avoidance of laws saying who one can sell to and who one can't, and so forth. It is likely that many will be unhappy that some are using cryptography to avoid laws designed to control behavior. National borders are becoming more transparent than ever to data. A flood of bits crosses the borders of most developed countries--phone lines, cables, fibers, satellite up/downlinks, and millions of diskettes, tapes, CDs, etc. Stopping data at the borders is less than hopeless. Finally, the ability to move data around the world at will, the ability to communicate to remote sites at will, means that a kind of "regulatory arbitrage" can be used to avoid legal roadblocks. For example, remailing into the U.S. from a site in the Netherlands...whose laws apply? (If one thinks that U.S. laws should apply to sites in the Netherlands, does Iraqi law apply in the U.S.? And so on.) This regulatory arbitrage is also useful for avoiding the welter of laws and regulations which operations in one country may face, including the "deep pockets" lawsuits so many in the U.S. face. Moving operations on the Net outside a litigious jurisdiction is one step to reduce this business liability. Like Swiss banks, but different. 6 True Names and Anonymous Systems Something needs to be said about the role of anonymity and digital pseudonyms. This is a topic for an essay unto itself, of course. Are true names really needed? Why are they asked for? Does the nation-state have any valid reason to demand they be used? People want to know who they are dealing with, for psychological/evolutionary reasons and to better ensure traceability should they need to locate a person to enforce the terms of a transaction. The purely anonymous person is perhaps justifiably viewed with suspicion. And yet pseudonyms are successful in many cases. And we rarely know whether someone who presents himself by some name is "actually" that person. Authors, artists, performers, etc., often use pseudonyms. What matters is persistence, and nonforgeability. Crypto provides this. On the Cypherpunks list, well-respected digital pseudonyms have appeared and are thought of no less highly than their "real" colleagues are. The whole area of digitally-authenticated reputations, and the "reputation capital" that accumulates or is affected by the opinions of others, is an area that combines economics, game theory, psychology, and expectations. A lot more study is needed. It is unclear if governments will move to a system of demanding "Information Highway Driver's Licenses," figuratively speaking, or how systems like this could ever be enforced. (The chemistry of opaque nodes and links, again.) 7 Examples and Uses It surprises many people that some of these uses are already being intensively explored. Anonymous remailers are used by tens of thousands of persons-and perhaps abused. [13] And of course encryption, via RSA, PGP, etc., is very common in some communities. (Hackers, Net users, freedom fighters, white separatists, etc....I make no moral judgments here about those using these methods). Remailers are a good example to look at in more detail. There are two current main flavors of remailers: "Cypherpunk"-style remailers, which process text messages to redirect mail to another sites, using a command syntax that allows arbitrary nesting of remailing (as many sites as one wishes), with PGP encryption at each level of nesting. "Julf"-style remailer(s), based on the original work of Karl Kleinpaste and operated/maintained by Julf Helsingius, in Finland. No encryption, and only one such site at present. (This system has been used extensively for messages posted to the Usenet, and is basically successful. The model is based on operator trustworthiness, and his location in Finland, beyond the reach of court orders and subpoenas from most countries.) The Cypherpunks remailers currently number about 20, with more being added every month. There is no reason not to expect hundreds of such remailers in a few years. One experimental "information market" is BlackNet, a system which appeared in 1993 and which allows fully-anonymous, two-way exchanges of information of all sorts. There are reports that U.S. authorities have investigated this because of its presence on networks at Defense Department research labs. Not much they can do about it, of course, and more such entities are expected. (The implications for espionage are profound, and largely unstoppable. Anyone with a home computer and access to the Net or Web, in various forms, can use these methods to communicate securely, anonymously or pseudonymously, and with little fear of detection. "Digital dead drops" can be used to post information obtained, far more securely than the old physical dead drops...no more messages left in Coke cans at the bases of trees on remote roads.) Whistleblowing is another growing use of anonymous remailers, with folks fearing retaliation using remailers to publicly post information. (Of course, there's a fine line between whistleblowing, revenge, and espionage.) Data havens, for the storage and marketing of controversial information is another area of likely future growth. Nearly any kind of information, medical, religious, chemical, etc., is illegal or proscribed in one or more countries, so those seeking this illegal information will turn to anonymous messaging systems to access--and perhaps purchase, with anonymous digital cash--this information. This might include credit data bases, deadbeat renter files, organ bank markets, etc. (These are all things which have various restrictions on them in the U.S., for example....one cannot compile credit data bases, or lists of deadbeat renters, without meeting various restrictions.

The global COVID-19 pandemic is the defining crisis of our historical moment, so let’s start with this. During the pandemic, as you know, racism, violence, exploitation and other injustices, including a system of vaccine apartheid (where only the wealthy world has had abundant access to the vaccines), have increased dramatically against oppressed people: POC, women, workers, refugees. What lessons can we learn about the nature of capitalism from the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic? What are your own reflections on this situation? For me, this is a very difficult question. I see it very much as a capitalist crisis in two senses. Firstly, in the sense that the pandemic, which I think is very real indeed, is a product of the destruction of the equilibrium between human and other forms of life. And that destruction is propelled by the capitalist pursuit of profit. The very fact of the pandemic just tells us of the destructive nature of the society in which we live. Secondly, we have to see it as a capitalist crisis in terms of its effects, particularly its economic effects. Before the crisis, many or even most mainstream economists were saying: “There is a crisis coming, we don’t know exactly when, but it is going to be a very major crisis.” The pandemic has precipitated that crisis — the coronavirus “crisis” is very much part of the dynamic of capitalism. Beyond that, what is very clear, is the way in which the political measures taken by different states seem to be a combination of genuinely wanting to reduce the impact of the pandemic and yet also take advantage of the pandemic to increase state control over society. I think that is true everywhere, in terms of the degree of surveillance that has been developed. Moreover, I think that the question of obedience to those state measures is obviously very much an issue at the moment. I see the acceptance of security measures — vaccination, face masks, social distancing — as social solidarity. We do it not just to protect ourselves, but we are also protecting people around us. And that seems to me a very important aspect. The last thing is that this crisis is leaving us in an extremely unpredictable situation. There is an awful lot of frustration from people wanting to get out; wanting to escape this feeling of being closed in. People suffered enormously over the past two years. They have suffered poverty, loss of income, they have suffered in terms of health and because of the loss of their loved ones. I think there is huge frustration there which may express itself in very big eruptions of social discontent. This is already expressing itself, particularly in Europe, in explosions of social anger. But it is really hard to foresee just how far those will go and what their significance will be. You related your discussion of the coronavirus pandemic to the ecological crisis, an issue which many intellectuals and politicians are trying to resolve by means of the state. You criticized this approach in one of your articles, published in ROAR Magazine. How can we face the ecological crisis without relying on the state? That is obviously a huge question. We have just seen COP-26 a few weeks ago. I don’t think that the climate crisis can be solved within capitalism. It is hard to be absolutely sure. If we think of Marx and his discussion of the different Factory Acts passed by the British government in the 19th century and capital, he is saying there, really, that capital comes up against its limits in terms of the destruction of the labor force on which it depends. It manages to solve its self-destructive tendency, Marx argues, by accepting the reduction of the working day. I think we are in a situation now in which the future of capitalism — and of course the future of humanity — is threatened by the destruction of the natural environment. Is it possible to solve that problem within the framework of capitalism? I think probably not. In a society in which the driving power is the pursuit of profit, it is just not going to be possible to solve the climate crisis. In other words, we are in some ways being confronted more urgently than ever with the question of how on earth do we get rid of capital? How do we get rid of money, if we think that money is the dynamic of profit? I think what we are looking for is very much part of the Kurdish movement, the Zapatista movement, and the many other movements that challenge the logic of capital: it is to take this situation into our own hands, and not to depend on the state but to really develop our own practices, our own ways of developing different relations to nature and other forms of life. And that obviously is central in the whole idea of eco-socialism and eco-feminism. I think that has to be a central part of any struggle to transform the world. It is not just getting rid of capital but also transforming our relations to other forms of life. In your book “Change the World Without Taking Power,” you redefined many concepts, such as “doing” vs. ” labor,” “power to” vs. “power over,” “knowledge to” vs. “knowledge over,” as well as the concept of revolution. You continued to develop these themes in your book “Crack Capitalism.” I would like to know what political and philosophical influences inspired you to rethink revolution as a process which must be undertaken without taking state power or winning elections, and the importance of that in the revolutionary practice? Oh, I would like to say something before answering your question because I might forget to say otherwise: Change the World Without Taking Power has been published in Arabic in December. For me it is very exciting! Wow, that is great news! I think it will be read by many people, especially by people from Rojava, northeast Syria. As far as I know your works are not yet available in Arabic. This is great! I think it was a combination of things. In the 1970s, I was involved in the debates around the state in Britain, which were influenced by all the struggles taking place at that time but also by the German state derivation debate. This was concerned with the question of how to understand the state as a particular form of the capital relation. From this came the conclusion that you could not possibly use the state to overcome capitalism. They said from the beginning: “We don’t want to take power.” It is not a question of conquering power, it is a question of making the world anew. And this obviously fitted in perfectly with the theoretical debate that we had been having in Britain. Has Open Marxism played a role in that? Yes, I think so. For me, Open Marxism is really about trying to open the categories of Marxism, and to understand those categories as conceptualizations of struggle. It is really a question of understanding the commodity not as a thing, and not just as a form of domination, but also as a form of struggle. The same is true for money, if you think of it as a constant struggle to push us into a certain way of acting, a certain way of behavior. Just the imposition of money on our daily lives kills thousands and thousands of people each day, it kills them either because of violence, hunger, suicide, or whatever. So, the idea of Open Marxism is trying to understand that these categories are categories for struggle. So, we think of the state as a struggle that comes from above to impose certain ways of acting upon us. To think of the state means that we also think of anti-state; the movement in the opposite direction. Or to think of the state means really to think in terms of the opposite; assemblies, communes, collectives that move in the opposite direction. The state as not just this thing outside us; the state is the struggle that comes from above to impose on us certain forms of behavior and organization. So the commune is a movement in the opposite direction. It is the movement of resistance, rebellion against the state. In other words, the purpose of Open Marxism is to invoke contradiction within these categories.. Yes, contradiction, but we prefer to talk about antagonism because contradiction can be understood in non-social terms. We say that all these categories are antagonistic. Is it enough to go beyond state power? Can domination and hierarchy thrive in a stateless society? Murray Bookchin, Abdullah Öcalan and David Graeber, among others, argued that even in stateless society hierarchy and domination can exist. Can a stateless society be a guarantee our freedom? There is no guarantee of anything [laughs], that is the problem. What we know is that the state is an oppressive form of organization, and we know that the state depends, for its existence, on the reproduction of capital accumulation, because that is where it gets its money from. If you have a big number of state officials who are not producing anything, then for them to survive there has to be an income, an income coming into the state, and that can only come from capital accumulation — which means that the state has to promote capital accumulation. Since we are talking about the state, David Graeber once said that your book “Change the World Without Taking Power” is widely read by many anarchists and attractive to them. Although you identify yourself as a Marxist, what do you think of that? As a Communalist, I am also more attracted to your work than the work of other Marxists. [Laughs] No, I don’t define myself at all. But, yes, of course I come from a Marxist background. I think Marxism is very important. Firstly, because it says capital depends on us. We think that we are just the victim and oppressed, but in fact capital depends on us. Secondly, I think this is what the labor theory of value is about: it says that value is produced by us, and therefore capital depends on us. It opens up, then, a way of understanding capitalist development as the constant struggle of capital to overcome its dependence on us. We may think that we are losing, or have been losing for the past over 30 or 40 years or more, but there is also a sense in which capital is losing, and that the existence of capital is becoming more and more fragile and this is what was expressed in the financial crisis in 2008, and what is also being expressed in a complex way in the coronavirus crisis. Since you have mentioned fragility, is that why you were influenced by Theodor W. Adorno, who gave us tools for negation and going beyond the system? Yes, I mean in terms of theoretical influences I suppose two big influences on me have been Ernst Bloch, the philosopher of hope, and Adorno, because of his view that at the center of society there is a force of non-identity which identity can never capture completely. In other words, we are never contained. We misfit, we overflow all the categories of thought and all forms of social organization. This is expressed for me by the Zapatistas when planning their arrival in Spain on their recent trip: “We are going to Spain and the first thing we will say is: ‘You did not conquer us because we resist and rebel. And we have always resisted and rebelled,'” and for me this is the idea of Adorno. However, I don’t think Adorno thought in these political terms. But if we think of any category, we can always say of that category: “You did not conquer us.” So, we can say to money: “You think you have conquered us, you think we are completely subordinated to the rules of money but no you did not conquer us, we resist and rebel.” Identity encloses us, defines us, but for that reason it is always an untruth simply because we do not fit into any definition, we always overflow. There is in any movement a contradiction between identitarian and anti-identitarian tendencies, an inner tension that is crucial for the movement. If the Kurds defined themselves just as Kurds, they would not be the force they are. The same if the Zapatistas saw themselves as just indigenous, or if the women’s movement defined itself in terms of women, of the movement for Black liberation just in terms of Blackness. It is what Raoul Vaneigem calls the “poetry of overflowing” that is all important. You see that resistance and rebellion in so many different ways in everyday life, when we say: “We will not live according to the logic of money. We will try to live according to the values that go against and beyond the capitalist concept of value.” In “Crack Capitalism,” you tied-up abstract labor with male domination. Does that mean any revolt against capitalism must be feminist as well, and women must play a significant role in the revolt? I think so, yes. Capitalism pushes us all the time into different categories. It pushes us into classes, but also pushes us into genders and says to us: “Because of your physical characteristics you must behave in a certain way.” I think I understand anti-capitalism as being a revolt against classification, therefore, a revolt against genderization. Yes of course, that means the revolt of women against their categorization in gender terms seems to me very important. Now, Bookchin has always insisted that the left should take its guidance from Ernest Bloch’s “Principle of Hope” or else fall into the trap of nihilism and pessimism. You are also influenced by Bloch; how can Bloch’s writings be a guide for our leftist movements in these dark times? Yes, for me Bloch has been an enormous influence, although of course there are many things I disagree with. I started reading Bloch, and really from Bloch I got into Marx, and everything else. The idea of the Principle of Hope is really to think of the world from the perspective of hope. That means to think beyond where we are, to open up a possible future — that has to be at the center of our thoughts. Since you have mentioned “Change the World Without Taking Power” and “Crack Capitalism,” I hope there is a third book coming. I see it as the third in the trilogy, which is called “Think Hope in Hopeless Times.” I thought I had finished it last August, but it will take another couple of months. Hope is limited by money basically. Because, if you think of hope,— this kind of striving to go ahead, trying to break out from where we are and create a different world — then the limit that we hit all the time is money. How are you going to do it if you don’t have money? But money forces us all the time into certain ways of behaving. Just because we need to eat, we need money, unless we cultivate everything ourselves. So, we come up against an enormous force of money as a form of organizing society. So, if you want to take hope seriously, the real question is: “Can you possibly think of hope breaking the power of money?” When I finish the book, of course I will have the answer [laughs]. I would like to move on to Kurdish issues now. How did you find out about the Kurdish struggle and the Rojava revolution (now called the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria)? Azize Aslan has been very important in my education. Of course, I knew of the movement before that from my general reading, and hearing about it from friends. Then I was invited to a conference in Hamburg in 2015 which was tremendously exciting for me. After that, Havin Guneser visited Puebla — where I am based — a few times and talked about the movement. So we had plenty of time to discuss, and then Azize came to us to do her doctorate over four years ago. That has been a terrific experience; learning from her and about the organization and its contradictions. In your opinion, what do you think have been the main achievements of, and the main challenges faced by, the Rojava Revolution? The obvious achievement, I suppose, is just to have moved the whole ground of revolutionary anti-capitalist thought and anti-capitalist organization. The Rojava revolution has shown that by not only saying: “We don’t want to conquer the state,” but by actually putting anti-state organization into practice on a fairly large scale over the past nine years. This anti-state organization is a form of communal organization. It is the revolution that they have achieved, and are achieving in terms of the position of women, and the leading role of women in social transformation. It is the importance that they attach to transforming the relationship between humans and nature. It really takes the challenge of changing the world into new terrain. It opens up a way of thinking about changing the world which, of course, is related also to what Zapatistas have been saying and practicing for 28 years in public, but it is on a different scale; for starters, it is more urbanized. The extraordinary thing is being able to carry on with doing that in such a difficult situation of constant military aggression.

Traditional state-centric theories of IR often fail to address the emergence of 'anomalous' phenomenon, such as the increasing significance of non-state actors in international relations and emerging patterns which challenge the presumption that states are the only source of governance (Rosenau, 2002). It has been noted by many authors that the focus on the state in IR is most problematic in that it, and the state itself, are considered to be completely unproblematic 'categories of thought' (Bourdieu, 1994, p1; Rosenau, 2002). The inability of mainstream IR theory to conceive of the state critically may be regarded as a consequence of the mutually reinforcing relationship between dominant theories and the state system, as well as a result of the various reinforcing social structures of the state that have 'all the appearances' of being natural and remove from thought alternative trajectories (Bourdieu, 1994, p4). At the same time, the inability to theorise beyond the state reinforces state domination in practice, by replicating and reinforcing hegemony in our ability to conceive and produce knowledge of the world (Smith, 2004). Turner's discussion of the state begins by building on the work of Charles Tilly, drawing on the edited volume The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975). Turner presents Tilly's work on the state by positioning the 'origin of state-centered governance... to the Treaty of Westphalia' (Turner, 1998, p26). This initial point of departure truncates the history of the state and fails to emphasise the focus of Tilly's work; the imperial expanding national state. Tilly's later work on the state, in 'War-Making and State-Making as Organized Crime' (1985) outlines his hypothesis regarding the origins and mechanisms of centralised power that led to the development of the early state system. In 'War-Making and State-Making', Tilly suggests that states evolved from the collusion of early landowners, the economic elite and mercenaries. The role of the economic elite is essential as they provided the initial means for expansionist landowners to employ mercenaries who would extend their borders externally and control the new populations through force internally. As populations within the borders increased, new war funds became available through the administration of taxes. In his work, Tilly refers to the early state actors as operating a protection racket; taxation was forcibly extracted from populations by internal mercenaries to be used to further war efforts and expand territory. Emerging from this system of violence, coercion and organised crime came distinct proto-state actors; the internal policing force, the external military, the economic elite, the political magnate and, most importantly, a burgeoning administrative class that emerged to manage the taxes and who laid the institutional foundation of the modern state. The elements that are missing from Turner's summary of Tilly's state are the essential roles of capitalism, imperialism and the collusion of the economic class in the violence of the state. While Turner notes that Tilly 'argues that the first European state were ultimately responsible for the most violence extension of the state system throughout the entire world' (Turner, 1998, p27), he fails to provide the theoretical basis from which Tilly argues this point. For Tilly, in both The Formation of National States in Western Europe and in 'War-Making and State-Making as Organized Crime', the violence of the state, both internal coercion and external warfare, are propelled by the enmeshed relationship of the state and capitalism. Tilly acknowledges the broader structures of violence in the international system and draws on Lenin in his critique of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism. Turner also suggests that violence is central to 'the very nature of state as institutional hierarchy' (1998, p28). However, Turner suggests that realism is blind to this, focusing instead on 'the Hobbesian conception of international anarchy' (ibid.). The misdirection of subtext here suggests that social contract theory and realist conceptions of anarchy are incapable of accessing the true origins of the state, despite these also being concepts inherent to liberalism. Though Turner seems to suggest that contrary to social contract theory, the state is not a source of protection and order, but rather the main source of violence in society, he fails to push this critique to its logical conclusion: the end of the state. Instead, as in many arguments made in support of civil society within the domestic and international realms, Turner's theoretical positions remains rooted in the liberal tradition when he notes that global civil society challenges the legitimacy of the state through 'international standards, discursive diversity and global public opinion' in order to 'redefine the parameters of acceptable institutional behaviour' (ibid.). This view concisely echoes a familiar liberal approach to criticisms of the state: the system itself is not at fault, it is simply not being held to a high enough standard. Through Tilly's work, Turner folds two critical theories under the wings of liberalism. First, anarchist theory and its critiques of the state are appropriated to argue that realism is incapable of making key insights regarding non-state actors. The sleight of hand hidden in this argument is that liberalism is concerned with addressing non-state actors where realism is not. Rather than speaking from the familiar debate between liberalism and realism, Turner employs anarchism to make arguments that are unproblematic for a liberal theorist. Second, Tilly's Marxist analysis is diluted through a selective use of his works, erasing the important influences of capitalism, taxation and the radical critique that states are not inevitable political institutions, as social contract theory claims. By emphasising Tilly's critique of the colonial, expansionist state, Turner is able to void Tilly's work of Marxism and suggest a haphazard, social contract theory based birth date for the sovereign state: the Treaty of Westphalia, the ultimate liberal achievement in international cooperation. GLOBALISING GOVERNANCE, CIVIL SOCIETY AND CITIZENSHIP In his article, Turner argues that global governance is representative of a new mode of international relations where global citizens are 'not the passive object' of the machinations of states, but 'an active participant in shaping not only immediate policies but also the long-term parameters of legitimacy of the state' (1998, p40). The following assesses Turner's argument and suggests that rather than heralding the dawn of an anarchist future, this approach to global activism is much more representative of a stronger state system, where non-state global relations are understood as an extension of state power. Global governance has become a sub-field of study concerned with the problem-solving actions and interactions of state and non-state actors. As noted by Zurn (2013) the current debate regarding global governance addresses questions regarding the transnationalisation of governance, multi-level governance and transformations of statehood and 'its impact on the notion of democracy', though none of these debates 'have come up with conclusive results' (pp409-409). Conceptually, global governance may be viewed as representing two perspectives. The first is analytically based, wherein global governance aims to describe 'a specific set of observable and related phenomena' which seek to overcome barriers to globally coordinated action (Dingwerth & Pattberg, 2006, p190). The second is normatively based, where global governance seeks to achieve desirable outcomes within globally coordinated activity (Brand, 2005; Zurn, 2013). Global governance therefore expands the scope of IR inquiry, but does so without significantly challenging state-centrism in international politics. For example, much of the scholarship which focuses on NGOs and social movements considers these in the context of international, state-centred regimes (Murphy, 2000). Further, the global governance perspective has been criticised for representing a paradigm which seeks to normalise conflicts resulting from the state and capitalism, such as economic crises resulting from neoliberal theory and aggressive liberalisation of markets (Brand, 2005). For some critics, the concept of global governance has emerged strategically to address a need for co-operation on 'economic, environmental, security, and political issues' and to advance 'common interests and values' (Barnett & Duvall, 2005, p1). In this view, global governance does not seek to respond to the failure of states, but rather acts as a 'hegemonic discourse to disguise the negative effects of neoliberal economic development on a global scale' (Dingwerth & Pattberg, 2006, p196). Through global governance discourse specific 'guidelines and practices are legitimised as appropriate' while other are dismissed (Brand, 2005, p157). For example, rather than seeking to fundamentally question or challenge the system that has produced instability and conflict, global governance seeks instead to improve the management of this system. As a consequence, global governance as a perspective is also limited. In spite of the attention given to non-state actors, the processes of economic global governance remain decisively directed towards the 'supremacy of the neoliberal agenda both within and across states' (Murphy, 2000, p796), thus skewing the ability of global governance to perceive and analyse these actors independently of the state. This interdependence is reflected in the construction of non-state actors are being members of a global civil society; a direct extension of the concept of the individual as existing only within the state system, as a citizen, in their actions beyond the state, even when engaging with other individuals or non-state groups. In defining global civil society, Turner begins with a list of actors such as the UN, EU, separatist movements, terrorist organisations, multinational corporations and non-governmental organisations before eliminating those that are statist 'in orientation', seeking to establish or control a state or 'motivated solely by profit', leaving 'critical social movements' as the constitutive group (1998, p28). For Turner, this group includes 'environmentally conscious indigenous peoples' who seek to address 'problems that are not amenable to direct policy responses' (p30). However, upon closer inspection, the protests effected by the groups listed (1) are directed towards the state, the economy and/or rely on human rights models that seek ultimately to hold the state accountable. Further, Turner notes that these groups employ technology to help 'globalize citizenship', though this contests Turner's claim that the diversity of these critical social movements challenge the liberal system by rejecting the state system and ideology (pp30-32). Turner argues further that 'global civil society challenges the state's monopoly of authority by redefining the nature of legitimacy' through the pressure of a 'diverse and activated global citizenry' (p33). However, due to the diverse and different nature of these actors, in order to incorporate these critical social movements as part of global civil society, it 'may be necessary to reconceive the meaning of citizenship' (p32). Though this appears at first to be a critical insight, citizenship is a highly contested concept. Not only is citizenship bound to the state which creates, sustains and revokes this status on the basis of exception, it is also through the progressive expansion of the meaning of citizenship to include and thereby conform individuals that liberal system of centralised state government is perpetuated. The history of citizenship demonstrates a continuous incorporation of dissent against inequality by creating exceptional inclusions to sustain liberal state domination. The liberal system of political organisation has stretched to require, seemingly by demand though more accurately motivated by inequality, that all individuals within societies be citizens first and foremost. In essence, the only proper engagement with the state, including contestations of state power, may be advanced through our political identity as individual citizens. From an anarchist perspective citizenship implies the disciplining and confinement of every individual within the liberal order. Whether through the state or through the discourse of a global society based within and across states, acting to hold states accountable, the concept of citizenship cannot be paired with anarchism's rejection of the state, even where this is simply a heuristic device. Thus, Turner's argument that a global civil society constitutes a form of global citizenship, which further empowers individuals and groups to perform as an activated citizenry, cannot be understood in anarchist terms. Instead, this discourse and conceptualisation of protest, action, agency and association is best understood as an expression of liberal theory as it does not reject the state, but instead applies a domestic state concept to the international as a means of incorporating social movements into global governance theory. Turner's vision of a 'globalist community' organised according to state principles, acting within 'the rights discourse', is therefore not an 'alternative normative' paradigm to 'state-centric realism', rather it is a normalisation of liberal theory as universal perspective (pp33-34). Further, the essential deconstruction and eradication of the state in anarchist theory is not 'very similar to the contemporary character of global civil society' as suggested by Turner (p38). Turner himself stresses that global civil society does not aim to 'overturn the state system' though 'it does represent a different set of priorities than those traditionally associated with the state system' (p39). Despite Turner's clarification that anarchism and his conception of global civil society are not theoretically compatible, it is this statement that is most problematic. By doing away with the straw man of overly pessimistic realism and presenting anarchist theory as a heuristic device and a radical, utopian alternative to global protest politics, Turner has led the reader to the moderate middle ground of liberalism. This misappropriation of anarchism allows Turner to include protest politics in the evolution of global governance theory, thereby perpetuating the dominance of institutionalism in IR theory and most importantly, retaining the sanctity of the state and centralised power in the face of an increasingly diversified field of engagement. Non-state actors are increasingly prevalent in international relations and analyses of this changing landscape must venture beyond the incorporation of new actors into old moulds and avoid the misappropriation of theoretical concepts in order to fortify hegemonic paradigms against their own weaknesses. Anarchist theory here has been reduced to a sub-optimal model employed to expedite an analysis of global governance while compensating for theoretical weaknesses in liberal theory. Most problematically, Turner has used anarchism to advance the principles, concepts and discourse of the state. This misappropriation of anarchism also creates a blurring of theoretical distinction, particularly where it used to distance global governance theory from criticisms of liberalism. From an anarchist perspective, the discourse and underlying ideology of global governance is limited by state-centrism and a normative agenda to advance liberalism. Further, global governance may be seen as seeking to embody the interests of the state in a discourse which presents itself as being in the general interest of world society (Brand, 2005). Through this same process, global governance delegiti-mises alternative orders, actions and interactions in the global political realm by privileging the experiences and interests of dominant actors (largely OECD states, politicians, and experts) and ideologies (liberalism, liberal democracy and neoliberal economics) (Brand, 2005). As a result of the embedded agenda of liberalism and the domination of state and political elites in the processes of global governance, the discourse in practice lacks non-coercive, anti-authoritarian or consensus-based legitimacy (Scholte, 2005). As noted by Scholte (2005), the regulation of global conflicts and commons does not draw on or require the consent of the global public, but instead avoids and evades progressive engagement and denies all possibilities for free or open participation and action to those outside of the global political or economic elite. Global governance is therefore incapable of addressing or considering meaningful emancipation, equality (both political and economic), free association or consensus. Most importantly, global governance is unable to conceptualise transformations of power and action that are beyond the interest, direction and authority of states.

Human beings have inhabited the planet for about 200,000 of its 4.5 billion years. For most of those 200,000 years, humans did not radically alter the ecosystem. But the Industrial Revolution, which began about two and a half centuries ago, saw human beings extract fossil fuels, tapping into a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. The energy from fossil fuels provided unparalleled wealth and military superiority to the planet’s industrialized north, which used its power to subjugate most of the rest of the globe to cheaply extract resources and abuse cheap labor. The human population rapidly climbed to over 7 billion. The air, water and ice have seriously degraded under the onslaught as the planet shifts from one climate to another, a climate that will no longer be hospitable to human habitation. The only existential question left is how we will choose to wait out the finale. But to pose that question is to defy the cultural mania for hope, the yearning for collective self-delusion. If reality is grim, you banish it. You invent impossible scenarios of inevitable salvation. Which explains how we ended up where we are. Most of the climate activists and operatives of democracy see themselves, like the wider consumer culture, as being in the business of selling hope. Without hope, they argue, people would succumb to despair. People would not resist the looming catastrophe. Of course, the opposite is true. Hope, or rather false hope, exacerbates despair and lethargy. It infantilizes the population. Carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may continue to wipe out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all will be right in the end. Only it won’t. We will not be able to adapt. Those who sell you the false hope that we can adapt are as self-deluded as those who brand global warming a hoax. And, at least subconsciously, many people know it. The longer we publicly deny the bleak reality before us and privately cope with our existential dread and pain, the more crippling despair becomes. This schizophrenic existence is a form of emotional abuse. It is imposed on us by a dominant culture that will not allow us to speak this tragic truth. This censorship forces us to struggle with reality in solitude, eroding our confidence in our perceptions and judgments. Andrea Dworkin in her essay “A Battered Wife Survives” wrote of effects of sustained abuse, saying that “one’s mind is shattered slowly over time, splintered into a thousand pieces. The mind is slowly submerged in chaos and despair, buried broken and barely alive in an impenetrable womb of isolation. This isolation is so absolute, so killing, so morbid, so malignant and devouring that there is nothing in one’s life but it, it. One is entirely shrouded in a loneliness that no earthquake could move.” She went on to ask “What is reality?” and then answered. The woman who was a battered wife and has escaped knows the answer: reality is when something is happening to you and you know it and can say it and when you say it other people understand what you mean and believe you. That is reality, and the battered wife, imprisoned alone in a nightmare that is happening to her, has lost it and cannot find it anywhere. Compared with the earth, none of us are around for very long. We are, to the cosmos, ephemerons. Our little lives blink on for a moment and then go dark. Nothing truly important can be achieved in a single lifetime. We must work toward something greater than ourselves. We must live fully, as Dworkin did, by summoning the courage to confront the starkness of the human condition and demanding justice, not because it will be achieved, since in its perfect form it will never be achieved, but because it defines us as distinct and sentient individuals. Justice cannot be fought for in the abstract. It must be grounded in a concrete confrontation with power—which is almost always embedded in white, male patriarchy—on behalf of the oppressed. This means sustained acts of defiance and civil disobedience that shut down city roads, airports and pipelines. Corporate capitalism and imperialism, which created the ecological debacle, will be destroyed or these forces will kill us in an unprecedented global genocide. “The struggle for climate justice is a struggle at the crossroads of historic and present injustices and a looming disaster that will prove to be, if allowed to unfold unchecked, the mother of all injustices,” writes Wen Stephenson. “Because the disaster that is unfolding now will not only compound the suffering of those already oppressed (indeed, is already compounding it); it may very well foreclose any hope of economic stability and social justice for current and future generations.

A Disastrous Convergence: Masculinity, Fossil Fuels and Authoritarianism A political-economic reading of fossil fuel systems, such as that undertaken by Mitchell or Huber, is indispensable to understanding the formation of fossil authoritarianism. The threat to fossil-fuelled privilege can motivate authoritarian practices to secure ongoing profits and privileged ways of life. However, as many have pointed out, fossil fuels may no longer make economic sense for many American voters, much less for the planet. Coal companies do not provide the secure, high-paying jobs that they once did in the US, a trend that will continue no matter how committed Trump is to bringing back coal.41 Even Texas, which continues to revel in its identity as an oil and gas titan, has been vigorously developing wind power, which supplies up to half of the state’s electricity needs.42 In many formerly fossil-bound regions of the US, like Appalachia or Texas, fossil fuels have become potent conservative symbols that represent autonomy and self-sufficiency, rather than real economic interests for most of the public.43 In addition to considering the political economy of fossil fuels, then, it is also important to understand their psycho-affective dimensions, paying attention to the collective desires of those whose identities are most tied to petrocultures. In order to do so, this section puts the concept of petro-masculinity into conversation with psycho-political studies of authoritarianism. The Frankfurt School was involved in the most influential early research, which drew heavily upon Freudian analysis, including The Authoritarian Personality (to which Theodor Adorno contributed), a study of fascist-prone Americans, and Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. These texts sought to trace the contours of the authoritarian personality – an ideal figuration, rather than descriptions of actual people. Many authoritarian traits were, to some degree, common in public life, but when amplified and in combination, they described a character ‘whose structure is such as to render [them] him particularly susceptible to antidemocratic propaganda’.44 And because authoritarian desires circulate everywhere, albeit with local intensities, authoritarianism persists as an ongoing temptation amid democratic collectives. In this vein, Foucault, in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, famously encouraged a conceptual distinction between ‘historical fascism’ and ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’.45 Psychological studies of authoritarianism in the 20th century are best taken as narratives of specific historical movements, rather than as universal scientific truths. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify patterns. One of the most consistent themes that runs across Western authoritarian movements is a widespread sense of gender anxiety – especially having to do with masculinity.46 Patriarchal ideals are manically proclaimed (by adherents who identify as women, too), but beneath the obsession with hyper-masculinity reveals an underlying fear of the social fragility of masculinity, as well as a shared sense among members of each having personally fallen short of that ideal. Capitalist crises, such as the worldwide depression of the 1930s or the 2008 financial crisis, do not help; they only make it more difficult for many to achieve that essential emblem of modern masculinity: a breadwinner job. The Authoritarian Personality notes that ‘high-scoring’ men (those with more authoritarian traits) ‘show deep-seated fears of weakness’ in themselves. The meaning of weakness to these men seems to be tied up with intense fears of nonmasculinity. To escape these fears they try to bolster themselves up by various antiweakness or pseudomasculinity defences, where pseudomasculinity means ‘boastfulness about such traits as determination, energy, industry, independence, decisiveness, and will power’.47 Gender anxiety – or a sense of masculine weakness – is intertwined with another common trait of the authoritarian character: sadomasochism. After all, masculine displays of strength and independence would seem to be at odds with unquestioning submission to an authoritarian leader. But as Fromm argues, ‘the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness … It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking’.48 In other words, sadomasochism reflects a desire to overpower others that is aroused by, and at the same time stymied by, one’s own sense of impotence. The failures of fossil capitalism to sustain its white masculine order, which it helped to erect, with wages and commodities, only exacerbates the sense of collective impotence. In order to manifest power, the impotent, authoritarian personality is forced to subsume its urge to dominate within submission to a stronger external force, be it God, the laws of the market, the military leader, or a tyrant. Or fossil fuel burning. Petro-masculinity points to such moments, suggesting that masculinity can be reaffirmed through an obeisance to oil. Oil itself reflects the contradictory impulses of sadism and masochism at work in the fossil-inflected authoritarian personality. Petro connotes both hardness and flow: it is from the Greek for rock or stone, but as petroleum, it is the liquid produced by pressurised decomposition of plant and animal matter over millions of years. It is both death (fossils), and life (energy, wrought from death), both compression and escape. As hardness, petro- captures the desire to congeal masculinity, and to protect it from dissipation. Alongside gender anxiety and sadomasochism, rigidity is yet another omnipresent trait of the authoritarian personality. In Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit’s study of the proto-Nazi freikorps, rigidity is an enduring theme for the ‘soldier-male dam’, who seeks to guard his dam against all that flows: none of the streams we’ve mentioned can be allowed to flow. He is out to prevent all of them from flowing: “imaginary” and real streams, streams of sperm and desire. … All of these flows are shut off; more important, not a single drop can be allowed to seep through the shell of the body. One little drop of pleasure … threatens to undermine the whole system (the system of dams). 49 Theweleit is important for understanding petro-masculinity because he opens up a link between feminist theory and political economy, between the fear of women and the fear of communists, both of which animated early Nazis. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Theweleit connects the freikorps’ fear of flow to the forces of industrialisation. Here we can begin to intuit how fossil fuels might feature in authoritarian desires. Theweleit describes how industrialisation ‘opens up the borders of a hitherto unknown human productive potential, setting in motion streams of money, commodities, and workers’.50 In parallel, though, runs ‘a process of limitation’ that the capitalist elite erects against pleasure, an effort to capture more and more surplus, and ‘to prevent the new productive possibilities from becoming new human freedoms’.51 Transgressive desires that are not coded by money cannot be allowed to flow – especially not queer desires, nor unregulated desires for women. Theweleit argues that it is the Western image of Woman, an image that ‘lives in water’,52 that comes to stand for flow qua flow, for all that threatens to escape and dissolve the male ego. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s foreword to Male Fantasies, she observes that ‘women’s bodies are the holes, swamps, pits of muck that can engulf’,53 and so they, perhaps more than anyone or anything, inspire revulsion and fear.