In the wake of every financial crisis, Joseph Schumpeter undergoes a revival. Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who wrote about business cycles and technological change. He proposed that capitalism carried itself forward through a process of
creative destruction. As new technologies or organizational principles arose, they necessitated the wreckage and replacement of previously-installed fixed capital (e.g. buildings, machines, even whole cities today). For many, the analogy to (the results of) today's financial crisis are acute: For productive accumulation to begin again, the ancien regime - from investment banks awash in bad debts to GM auto plants geared to produce SUVs - must be swept away.
This all sounds very radical. But in some senses, it's only the tip of the social-change iceberg. Revolutionaries, from the Jacobins through Lenin and to Milton Friedman and his neoliberal wrecking-crew, have called for acts of immense destruction before Utopian creation can begin anew. To quote Slavoj Zizek on the subject, the revolutionary process "begins with the gesture of radical negativity... There then follows a second stage, the invention of a new life - not only the construction of a new social reality within which our utopian dreams would be realized, but the (re)construction of those dreams themselves." (
The Universal Exception, p. 50)
The leftist revolutionaries invented guillotines and attempted to forge a New Man, one that could stand up to the task ahead of him. The neoliberal revolutionaries implemented shock treatment (literally and figuratively), attempting to flatten societies to an antediluvian free market state. In both cases, the proposed utopias were enabled only by immense destructive energies. Schumpeterian metaphors prevailed.
One of the things emerging from this is that utopia and apocalypse appear as two sides of the same document. On one side, the writ of creation; on the other, the death penalty for what (and who) came before. This connection has long since been ingrained in our collective unconsciousness.
We tend to project our utopian dreams onto the space outside the capitalist world-system. Before the imperialism of the late 19th century, utopia was imagined in the empty, uncolonized places. The frontier, cleansed first in imagination and then in reality of its native inhabitants, was seen as an Eden for the taking. In the 20th century, up until 1991, utopia was projected into the Soviet Union, the space carved out away from capitalism by the 1917 revolution.
There was, I think, a certain tension or anxiety that always operated vis-a-vis really-existing communism. At least until the revelations of the Stalinist and Cultural Revolution traumas, leftists saw the communist world as a possible space of hope. To reactionaries, communist nations were a potential threat to domestic hegemony, compelling them to make concessions to working-class movements. (In other words, capitalism was disciplined to cross-class acceptability in the form of the welfare state by a potentially attractive alternative.) In short, the Soviet Union forced the left to think about utopia, and the right to think about how it might be forestalled.
At the same time, there was the very serious spectre of nuclear destruction. Two mutual enemies in possession of enough bombs to irradiate every square mile of the earth presented an extremely obvious problem. By the 1980s, the US had a president that
joked about bombing Russia on live radio. To quote Reagan's ideological successor,
"This sucker could go down." Until 1991, Western society lived with a tension between utopia and apocalypse.
(An interesting note: Tariq Ali, among others, notes that many modern-day neo-conservative hawks were originally Trotskyists or Maoists. In short, they started out as the apostles of revolution and utopia, and by the Reagan administration were usually in the front row of the apocalyptic-minded "launch the missiles" chorus. This is no real coincidence.)
In 1991, of course, the Soviet Union collapsed, and China began its turn to capitalism. The jig was up for communist utopianism. At this point, an interesting move occurred. Francis Fukuyama symbolized it best: He wrote a book claiming that it was the "end of history", in the Hegelian sense, and that Utopia was at hand in the form of capitalism and liberal-democracy. This idea - that we were already living in utopia - captivated the imagination of those on the right who had formerly spoken out against utopian imagining.
Ironically, the foreclosing of any further utopian thinking has redirected energies into apocalypticism. The 1990s - for the Western world a peaceful and prosperous decade - spawned a slew of disaster movies (the asteroid movies, Independence Day, etc) and widespread panic over the hypothesized Y2K disaster. Millenarian cults and talk of "black helicopters" started to preoccupy the paranoid end of the political spectrum.
This decade has seen the further radicalization of apocalyptic thinking. The concept of utopia hasn't reappeared - outside of some corners of South America - but unbridled destruction has its day. Zombie catastrophe films are being made at a greater clip than ever, cities and countries are being wrecked by natural disasters (both on the screen and in real life), and al-Qaeda's message of bombs, bombs, and more bombs has its share of adherents.
The suppression of the world-building, utopian impulse has sucked us closer to irreversible catastrophe - financial, ecological, whatever - by ensuring that no serious alternatives to our current world-system are discussed in polite society. Everybody can imagine how the world might end; we all have our favorite pet conflagration. (To put it another way, we're all receiving signals from flesh-eating zombie radios.) Nobody has an image of alternative ways for humanity and the earth to go forward.
(In connection with this last remark, I highly recommend that you listen to David Harvey's remarks on the financial crisis -
A Financial Katrina.)
