Owen Worth, author of World order and the era of farce in Global Political Economy, argues that, rather than repeating the tragic crises of the 20th century, today’s unstable world order is characterised by a politics of farce, driven by populism, spectacle and the contradictions of a capitalism in permanent crisis.
There has been considerable debate in recent years about what is happening to our contemporary world order.
The relatively stable, (neo)liberal order that emerged after the Cold War is now widely regarded as in decline. It has given way to a period of greater instability, marked by renewed geopolitical tensions, the resurgence of right-wing populism and a reversal of the globalisation that defined preceding decades.
Yet, despite this, there also seems to be a degree of continuity within everyday life. The culture of capitalism covers every facet of society and allows individuals to engage with markets and generate wealth anytime and anywhere, via a small portable device. In this sense, free market capitalism has never been stronger.
In order to transform or replace it, a system would be needed to undermine the form of technological individualism that has emerged from the digital age. What has occurred, however, is that neoliberal capitalism has unravelled to the extent that it appears in a state of almost permanent crisis (as Tooze terms a ‘polycrisis’) whereby instability is created to levels that appear to be unsustainable.
In my recent article ‘World order and the era of farce’, published in Global Political Economy, I examine the existing literature on contemporary crises and argue that the current period may be characterised by something rather different: a politics of farce.
One significant way of understanding the current predicament is to adopt a methodological approach called comparative historical analysis, which looks at the characteristics of different historical orders in a manner that allows us to assess where the contemporary era might be leading.
For example, many commentators have suggested that we are heading into an era similar to that of the end of the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century, where greater forms of crisis and military conflict were to develop to the point of humanitarian collapse.
As Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation, despite contradictions and instabilities generated by the failure of 19th-century capitalism, a market mentality was still prevalent. It could not foresee any alternative, and the gold standard was being adopted by countries at an increasing rate. Here, we can see similarities with the 24/7 world of 21st century capitalism and indeed the reluctance to make any significant changes to the global economic system in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008/09.
Yet, we can only take these similarities so far. While the European nation system brought in a multipolar era that left behind the destruction of war, but also saw the emergence of nationalist, socialist and Keynesian forms of economics that would each contest the validity of international capitalism, our current age lacks these.
The political left has not managed to move beyond the left-leaning nationalism of the 20th century, where the state would provide the fulcrum of ownership and oversee the redistribution of the economy. Its failure to provide an international or global opposition that is in any way consistent or plausible has left it in almost continuous flux.
The populist right, on the other hand, has seemingly favoured forces of both protectionism and free market capitalism at the same time. These are compounded by a politics focusing on immigration, multiculturalism and ‘globalism’ in a manner that is both contradictory and incoherent. As the former veteran politician Dennis Skinner once said of Nigel Farage’s pre-Brexit UKIP, ‘that’s not a party…, that’s a man down the pub’.
Much contemporary politics has moved to a position where it seems to resemble a type of ‘farce’ rather than a politics that could lead to mass confrontation and catastrophe, reminiscent of the period 1914–1945.
Nothing has better represented this farce than the presidency of Donald Trump. He relies on performative politics and on antagonistic press conferences that appear unpredictable and spontaneous in nature. The content has led to policies that have very real consequences of transformations – such as his construction of tariffs. Yet, they have been applied in such an uneven and haphazard manner, lacking both coherence and ideological consistency, that it is difficult to understand them as part of a systematic long-term strategy. The era of social media, post-truth and the culture wars have all contributed to a form of performance politics, where politics is played out through a lens of empty populism, rather than through a battle of attrition or of contrasting ideologies.
In this way, I find Mikhail Bakhtin’s depiction of the carnival and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle useful metaphors for understanding contemporary politics. They help to explain why farce is all around us and why political forms of contestation are played out in the guise of conspiracy, weakly constructed assumptions and near satire in form and content.
Where does this leave the contemporary world order? At present, it remains stuck in a rut of uncertainty. Real tragedies, such as in Ukraine and Gaza, are played out, illustrating serious geopolitical problems, but no solutions to escape the confines of the (so-called) polycrisis are forthcoming.
The ideological clash of socialism, fascism and protracted liberalism that ended in the tragedy of the 20th century are not indicative of our times. To quote the much cited and immortal words of Karl Marx, history does appear to be repeating itself through the failure of capitalism, but the contemporary decline appears to have led to farce as opposed to tragedy.
Owen Worth is a Professor in Global Politics at the University of Limerick.
World order and the era of farce by Owen Worth is available to read in the Global Political Economy journal on Bristol University Press Digital here.
Follow Transforming Society so we can let you know when new articles publish.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Bristol University Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Image credit: BP Miller via Unsplash