Bertolt Brecht famously advised his allies on the left not to “start from the good old things, but the bad new ones”. It is a maxim that has guided various activist-writers over the years, wherever they have sought to identify and expose the latest mutations and dreamworlds of capitalist development. In recent decades, figures such as Naomi Klein and the late Mike Davis have kept this tradition alive, unearthing the “bad new” innovations, ideas and technologies that are restructuring the world around us on behalf of capital. Klein looked to the US policies rolled out in Iraq or post-Katrina New Orleans in search of an overarching economic logic. Davis mined the cityscapes of Los Angeles and Dubai for clues as to the latest forms of repression and exploitation.
Historian Quinn Slobodian’s fascinating Crack-Up Capitalism is in a similar vein, only with a distinctive twist: his case studies are chosen for having already been explicitly championed by libertarians and neoliberal intellectuals. Anti-democratic and authoritarian cities and regional experiments of the past 45 years – from Singapore to Somalia, from Liechtenstein to Honduras – are scrutinised less for how they function economically, and more for how they fuel the imaginations of reactionaries and market fundamentalists. This is a history of contemporary ideas – specifically those that seek to protect capitalism from the interferences of democratic politics – that is interwoven with a geography of the various territories on which those ideas descended.
