Quinn Slobodian: Crack-Up Capitalism (2023)
A Political Economy Library, Vol. 1
I have been posting book reviews on Goodreads, an Amazon-owned platform, for many years. My aim is to write a short review of every book I read. Unfortunately, Goodreads does no longer allow me to link directly to my reviews outside of the Goodreads community. They can only be accessed via the book page, which is useless when my review is buried among 239 others. So, I have decided to share some of my reviews via my Medium channel. This way, I will always be able to link directly to my reviews. Medium readers will be familiar with this format from the slowly expanding Systems Library that I have been building here.
Please note that most reviews are jotted down quite quickly. Their purpose is to help me recall what a given book is about. They are not full-fledged essays. Building this review database has proved immensely useful. My reading effort, which amounts to around 15,000 book pages per year, continues to yield intellectual dividends.
These days, I am focusing my reading on themes related to political economy. More to come.
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Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism traces the history of experiments conducted over the last forty years, with origins in colonial Hong Kong and the tax havens of the successor states of the Holy Roman Empire. The question guiding these experiments is:
What if it were possible to design ‘sovereign cities’ as sets of rules that maximise capital throughput, foreign direct investment inflows, land value appreciation, and secrecy, while minimising taxation, redistribution, and commitment to a social contract?
These are variations on the ‘Dubai’ and ‘Hong Kong’ models: open to capital, but closed to citizenship. Membership is a contract rather than a civic status. Ironically, these quasi-colonial enclaves, designed as exits from the state, depend entirely on the infrastructure, flows, courts, bailouts and coercive power of the states they supposedly defect from.
The legacy of this anarcho-capitalist movement has been mixed. While most experiments have faded away, the zone template they pioneered has become standard practice in global capitalism. Slobodian’s thesis is that ‘zones are tools of the state, not liberation from it’.
Beyond the book, my reading is that the Gulf States in particular have developed an extraordinary spatial footprint and political leverage in their short existence. They can provide capital to cash-strapped national and local governments (see an excellent piece in The Guardian today about how Manchester has been reshaped by UAE investments). They are involved in the energy transition, for instance buying strong positions in EU renewables projects. They have also developed a powerful position in logistics corridors (e.g. DP World). They play a key role in Middle Eastern politics and security. They are also becoming increasingly active in AI. The balance of power is shifting, with Europe in particular having to acquiesce to the terms set by the UAE in the lengthy, geopolitically ascendant process of converting assets away from fossil fuels that will shape the 21st century.
In his recent book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (with Ben Tarnoff), Slobodian discusses a similar process tied to the business empire of Elon Musk, who understood that the winning strategy was not to escape the state, but to fuse with it by selling ‘technosecurity’ and making himself indispensable to the very governments his predecessors once sought to escape from.
