Revisiting the Plutocratic Insurgency

A decade on, I think I got the basic contours right

Just over a decade ago, I wrote an essay entitled “The Twin Insurgency,” which proposed the somewhat cheeky thesis that what was emerging was a confluence of strategies between the rising global plutocratic class, on the one hand, and transnational criminal organizations, on the other. There are things about the essay that are now dated, but I think I got the fundamental disposition of the tech-libertarian broligarch class about right:

During the 1990s, a new class of globetrotting economic elites emerged, enriched by the opportunities created by globalizing industrial firms, deregulated financial services, and new technology platforms. This new class is an order of magnitude richer in absolute terms than previous generations of the ultra-wealthy. As Thomas Piketty has recently demonstrated, the rise of the new plutocrats since the 1970s reflects an historic shift in the structure of capital accumulation. The accumulation regime that predominated during the heyday of social modernism depended on a new class of workers who could afford the goods they were producing. The great fortunes of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were built on the backs of worker-consumers in primarily inward-looking national contexts. By contrast, today’s plutocrats thrive by selling their goods and services globally; their success is dramatically less connected to the fortunes of their fellow national citizens than was that of previous generations.

Moreover, the two signature types of massive wealth accumulation in the early 21^st century have been high technology and financial services. Neither of these industries relies on masses of laborers, so their productivity is detached from the health of any particular national middle class. The result has been a dramatic rise in inequality within countries, even as wealth inequality transnationally has narrowed.

The plutocrats have also developed novel ideological self-conceptions. Many see themselves as “the deserving winners of a tough worldwide competition” and regard efforts to make them to pay for public goods as little more than organized theft. Whereas during the Cold War the apparent availability of a socialist alternative pressured the ultra-rich to temper their maximalist ambitions, the collapse of communism removed that constraint, enabling a shift in how many of the new ultra-wealthy conceived their relationship with society. While some continued to see themselves as owing a debt of obligation to the societies in which they enriched themselves, a significant subset, particularly among financial elites, began to see their personal achievements as being detached from the success of the national societies in which they reside. Instead of seeing themselves as the ultimate winners of the systems in which they work, they characterized themselves as the noble rebels who made it on their own despite the drag caused by incumbents, loafers, and parasites in government and society. The growing popularity of the pseudo-philosophical novels of Ayn Rand, whose ideas George Monbiot refers to as “the Marxism of the new right”, represented the most visible manifestation of an ideology that depicts the rich as “makers” and the masses as shiftless “takers.” From Washington to London, plutocrat-funded think tanks devoted themselves to creating a body of usable ideas and policy proposals aimed at dismantling what is left of social modernity. This ideological shift heralded the arrival of the plutocratic insurgency.

The defining feature of the plutocratic insurgency is its goal: to defund or de-provision public goods in order to defang a state that its adherents see as a threat to their prerogatives. (Note that, conceptually, plutocratic insurgencies differ from kleptocracies; the latter use the institutions of state to loot the population, whereas the former wish to neutralize those institutions in order to facilitate private-sector looting. In practice, these may overlap or co-mingle.) Practically speaking, plutocratic insurgency takes the form of efforts to lower taxes, which necessitates cutting spending on public goods; reducing regulations that restrict corporate action or protect workers; and defunding or privatizing public institutions such as schools, health care, infrastructure, and social space.

The political strategy associated with the plutocratic insurgency is to use austerity in the face of economic shocks to rewrite social contracts on the basis of a much narrower set of mutual social obligations, the ultimate effect being to de-collectivize social risks. As a palliative for the loss of public goods and state-backed programs to improve public welfare, plutocratic insurgents typically promote philanthropy (directed toward ends defined not democratically but, naturally, by themselves alone). “There’s no such thing as society”, Margaret Thatcher famously declared, issuing the cri de cœur of insurgent plutocrats everywhere. If there’s no such thing as society, then the very idea of social services collapses, along with any responsibility on the part of the rich to contribute to them. From this perspective, plutocratic insurgency signifies the reimportation of the aforementioned “structural adjustment” policies (originally designed to discipline poor states) back into the rich, industrialized core.

One other thing I think I correctly intuited a decade ago was that a key politico-spatial implication of the Twin Insurgency was that the space of the national was fragmenting into “kaleidoscopic microsovereignties,” an argument that my friend

Quinn Slobodian

has recently developed at monographic length in his marvelous book Crack-Up Capitalism.

Quinn’s thesis is that the ultimate goal of what I called the plutocratic insurgents (and their intellectual and high-end service-economy henchmen) is to end the constraints that democratic nation-states impose on the privileges of the rich. These are rich men (and it is almost entirely men) who believe that their wealth should be untouchable, and that the privileges that this wealth buys should be unlimited. With Elon Musk’s DOGE, the mask is off: they are hell-bent on destroying any institutions of social care or risk-sharing that might touch their money or their privileges.

I cannot recommend Crack-Up Capitalism enough. Methodologically, is an intellectual history of the most notorious radical libertarians — from well-known assholes* like Milton Friedman and Peter Thiel to a congeries of even more colorful crackpots and kakistocrats — and their quest to craft for the perfect space for unfettered capitalism by shattering the map of allegedly sovereign territories into a variety of “exceptional” legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones, etc. It is also an historical travelogue, taking the reader (as its cover blurb says) “from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.” Best of all, Crack-Up Capitalism is wonderfully written: erudite and droll in equal measure (as the punning title itself suggests).

* I use the term “assholes” in the technical sense elaborated by Aaron James, chair of the UC Irvine philosophy department, in his 2012 book Assholes: A Theory, namely someone who “allows himself to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.” I was reading the book when I wrote “The Twin Insurgency” and, even though I didn’t cite it (the anxiety of influence?), I realize now looking back how much it informed my understanding of phenomenon of the plutocratic insurgency. Conversely, I suspect the empirical fact of the rising plutocratic insurgency may well have been part of what inspired James to write his own book.