There’s no feasibly solvent alternative to capitalism.

Now, for Stiegler, the question of technics is a Greek question because the relation between the human and the technical is explicitly posed by the Greeks, and any thinking on technology necessarily works within this Greek framework.5 Whatever one makes of this thesis technologically speaking, the question of the modern and contemporary autonomy of the economic from the social whole is nevertheless not Greek. With the end of the Cold War, with increasing trans-border activity of capital, goods, and, to a much lesser extent, labor, capital comes to determine the terms in which the allocation of scarce resources is made. Capital becomes, that is, general, and there is for the foreseeable future no alternative to it.6 All human beings live within the system of capital, whatever the particular node they live on, or conjunction they make with it. This system is highly unstable and dissymmetrical with immense imbalances in equality, natural resource distribution, financial assets, and terms of trade. With no alternative to capital, a revolutionary politics is no longer tenable. The ethical question driving political innovation has, consequently, to be worked out in terms of universally coordinated, but locally determined equilibriums between growth, sustainability, and equity. Given economic interdependence and the necessity of large transfers of technology and wealth from the developed world to the developing world in the context of climate change, effective financial regulation, economic coordination, and staggered development present the right strategies to tame the excesses of neoliberal global capitalism. Whether these strategies are feasible or not is at present an open question given recent government failure to regulate risk-taking and the evident dilemma, for developing countries, between the need for curtailed energy use, on the one hand, and industrialization and exit from poverty, on the other.

Now, whatever our answers to these large questions, the political question today—‘who are we?’—can only be appraised if the political economy of a globalized world becomes the direct object of critical attention. Only by foregrounding this object and its dilemmas will one have any chance of critical purchase on the political challenges ahead. In this context, Stiegler's foregrounding of technology to promote a new critique of political economy is decisive in purpose and tone, important in detail, but misplaced in general intent. Stiegler is right to stress again the pertinence of the economy for critical thought after “the supposed economism of Marxism” (2009: 29). His technologically trained focus on the alienated consumer is important within the cognitive dimension of contemporary capitalism and debt-led growth. But, if he is concerned to show, as a philosopher, the general lines of a re-invented critical political economy, his object and attention need to be much larger than his “Greek” framework affords. Since there is no systemic alternative to capitalism at this moment in history, the question of political economy is one of whether effective regulation of capitalism is possible or not for the world as a whole.

In this regard, I fear that Stiegler's rhetorical logic of excess testifies to a straightforward shift of Marxist terminology (from producer to consumer) rather than a reinvention of Marxism's object (political economy). I say this despite the deep interest in understanding cognitive capitalism and consumerism through Stiegler's categories. To take a few examples from only the last pages of Pour une nouvelle critique de l'économie politique: we are witnessing the “extreme disenchantment of the world” (2009: 88), a “generalized proletariat [of consumption]” (89), the “disappearance of the middle classes” (89), the “destruction” of social association (87), and “lawless and faithless” elites of capitalism (88). This logic of excess ignores the need today to make small distinctions, under the canopy of political regulation, within the world as a whole. The art of politics today is the prudential art of making critical distinctions within an economy of the same. “Critical philosophy” may wish to eschew such distinctions, but it does so at its practical peril when there is no alternative to capitalism, and when, just as importantly, the mid-term horizon is global coordination of a world economy under circumstances of economic imbalance, energy-crisis, and poverty.

The political questions today are therefore: “what kind of regulation of capitalism is ethically and empirically appropriate?”; “at what level is it appropriate?”; and “what instance should and can decide?”. These are vast and difficult questions for philosophy, political science, and economics: they will occupy minds and bodies for a long time to come. It is my belief that, within these questions and their distinctions, an engaged philosophy (which Stiegler rightly advocates) has an important role to play. A generalized technological reading of Marx creates in this context important cultural work; but it does not give itself the terms of a contemporary critique of political economy.

I end this section with one example of what kinds of matter need to be “adopted,” and how. There has been much talk recently of the regulation of financial offshore centers. Such talk, when coming from elite bodies in power, can serve as a smoke-screen to evade the major issue of imbalances within the world economy as a whole (particularly the northwestern problem of public and private debt). Worldwide coordinated investment in the real economy remains in this context an outstanding question. That said, the political regulation of these tax havens forms part of the ongoing struggle against international and national neoliberal practices, since it was financial offshore centers, starting with the Eurodollar markets, which helped promote capital mobility at the end of the 1970s.7 It is this capital mobility that ended the “social democratic contract” between capital and labor at the level of the nation-state and in the framework of the Bretton Woods international system of fixed exchange rates. It consequently paved the way for “disembedded” global capitalism, widespread debt-led growth, and, under worldwide conditions of financial contagion, massive social disorientation.8 The financial and economic crises of 2007–09 resulted from “de-regulation” of domestic and global assets (from mortgages to complex financial tools like swaps and derivatives). This de-regulation enabled financial capital accumulation from the 1970s onwards. It is now generally accepted that 60 percent of profits in the corporate sector have been finance-based in the last ten years (Brenner 2006: 293). To regulate offshore accounts in this context is therefore ideologically and structurally crucial for the political “adoption” of contemporary capitalism. For, owners of these accounts have fed the recent spiral of risk-taking (a half of global capital is estimated to lie in such accounts!), but they have continued to refuse the social costs of (their) national public life. The object of concern for critical political economy is consequently less the credit-card-consumer (and profits based on the capitalization of his or her external memory supports) than effective regulation of their economic causes.

That said, how, in today's world economy, can one regulate these capital accounts? This is the urgent political question. To stop the businesses of nations moving large amounts of their capital offshore to avoid domestic taxation suggests either the necessity of global taxation or renewed domestic regulation of capital outflow (as in the 1960s and 1970s in “embedded” liberal states). The political cosmopolitan response—global regulations of all international capital flows—is certainly the best response theoretically since capital competition thrives on exceptions to legal norms. It is however institutionally impractical given the weak status of international rule. Nation-state fiscal policy is practical since it can block capital displacement to more competitive national markets. National monetary policy requires, however, clear leadership, democratic example, and effective bureaucratic surveillance (and in the case of the EU it is already not possible given the monetary sovereignty of the European Central Bank). And so forth. My point is this.

These kinds of dilemmas immediately face any progressive thinking of political economy today: they require careful ethical and empirical exposition before one can make general critical claims. The regulation of financial offshore centers is actually one of the more simple problems of global cooperation to solve, although its structural effects will be deep concerning finance-led growth. How much more conceptual and empirical thinking is needed to work out market and government motivation for effective climate change mitigation; or to work out long-term the global imbalance between Chinese savings and US debt … Regarding these political dilemmas concerning effective regulation of global capital flows, I remain unconvinced that Stiegler's philosophico-technical reading of the economy can (1) properly delimit the economic problems that need to be adopted; and (2) tease out the differences of approach required to adopt contemporary economic conditions effectively. Under the general conditions of a capitalist world economy, however, these differences constitute the very condition of more local social re-motivation (Stiegler's very concern).