Among the words offered by the Thesaurus that fit with 'conjuncture' is the word 'apex.' In a political sense 'conjuncture' suggests a gathering of important political events and attitudes that summarise a moment (in time and/or place) and that creates a definition, or meaning, of the main engine of events. 'Apex' is better though, because it also suggests a pinnacle which, in turn, suggests a new slope ahead.
This short argument is going to try to identify the pinnacle and offer some comments about the slope.
In fact all over the left (and the more scary right) in Europe and the US, politicians, writers, reporters and speculators are focussing on the conjuncture. Why? Because it is obvious that globalisation is bursting. Despite Tony Blair's think-tank, etc, etc, globalisation has been bubbling up higher and higher for some years and now it is popping across the world. Blair (and many others) sincerely believed that globalisation was the ultimate story of capitalism and that it has decades, perhaps millennia, to go. This blog has often argued about the inherent weakness of globalisation. Many others thought so too. So we can leave that item aside for the moment. Whether you think that globalisation was a consequence of the weakness of western imperialism or you think it was all down to Corona, globalisation, as it stood, is over.
The main forces that are bursting the global bubble are the US and, latterly, the EU. China is still (desperately) trying to make tariffs go away. (Chinese economists are publicly hinting at the removal of their funds from the US if they do not pull back from current economic attacks.) But the massive U.S. financial system has assets of about $100 trillion as of the end of 2019, according to the International Monetary Fund. There is no doubt that the US still runs the world.
It’s not clear how large China’s financial system overall is. Chinese banking institutions had assets of 285 trillion yuan ($40.7 trillion) at the end of September 2019, according to state reports. Total Chinese investment in the U.S. economy has reached over $145 billion. And China owns about $1.1 trillion in U.S. debts. (This sounds big - and the Chinese are beginning to use it as a lever - but it is still less than Japanese loans in the US.)
The US, followed by Australia and now the UK and Germany, are pushing back against Chinese exports and their general, global, investment. This will deepen, regardless even if Trump is dumped or Boris is really back-stabbed by Gove or the EU mandarins start moaning at Merkel.
These terrifyingly facts (a massive economic war has always led to the real thing) are covered over in most of the West's population by (governments who are dealing with) Corona. It is apparently the Corona that is changing the world, shutting up the big shops in the City centres, stopping the lips-tasting Langdoc this year in the garden, destroying all those charming young peoples' cheery jobs. There are acres and acres of books, pods, blogs, programmes and conversations about how the western world will now change because of the Pandemic. Bollocks. What is happening is that the West is using their state powers to deal with the Pandemic but also (see Boris's denial of any more austerity) to create a new type of capitalist investment. Does anyone think that after Corona we will be just the same as 2019? That thought is enough to show that Corona is not the issue.
Everybody is in to it. Cummings, Boris's advisor-stroke-brain, wants the UK to build its own £2trillion version of FANG - (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google.) There are similar dreams across the Western nations as politicians starry eyes get-going by rooting up more and more breathless names of future tech that will provide a new centre of the globe (and another decade or two of stupendous wealth.) The UK's version is to be a signal part of the 'famous five' - of the US (big daddy), UK (first son), Australia, Canada, New Zealand - that will hopefully wrap up the wealth of Asia and Africa's demand for the new, Anglo-Saxon FANG.
Sadly, this momentum has been also picked up by parts of the left (Varoufakis, Paul Mason et al) who have begun to imagine that the new state-based initiatives will create some openings for state action that could be used to distribute wealth and reduce private ownership. But we have already seen how the 'new' state action works. Test and Trace, which is a mess particularly in England, gets called by Boris 'the NHS Test and Trace' when he is denying all of his mistakes. But Test and Trace in England was sold to SERCO, one of those most useless companies that has regularly failed in all their other 'public services. The Apex has provided state action mainly to hold up companies and to re-finance some of the NHS. But we have now reached the slope; a slope that will bring the fantasy FANG mark 2, and any other new version of capitalism, smashing to the ground as the state desperately delivers...to private enterprise. (Has everyone forgotten the first dot.com economic collapse in 2000?)
Nevertheless, the new champions of the would-be 'famous five', with their scruffy West Coast clothes and their false hatred of the 'deep state' and their pretences that they are the underdog, (eg.,Cummings, Boris et al) sincerely imagine that this vast new FANG is just there, an inch away from the treasure chest. Sadly, the tech revolution, tied as it is to future of capitalism, has already run out of substantial new tech! All the main super-future tech goals are already failing. And the idea that something elementally new is just around the corner but unseen by the current FANG lot, is simply ludicrous. Yet they are ready to dole out £billions to private firms that sound good. In reality, the only thing that can and will be extended and promoted is more and more surveillance, which is a definite 'yes' as far as the use of dominant state powers are concerned. Surveillance is particularly required in the West as the upsurges after Corona begin.
(And breaking treaties? The French described the truth of the 'perfidious Albion' centuries ago. The British state is known across the whole world for its history of lies and twists. Take the Middle East in only one example. The secret agreement between Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot in May 1916 divided the Ottoman lands into British and French spheres – and came to light only when it was published by the Bolsheviks.
Boris is breaking the EU Withdrawal Agreement because, if there is no Canada style agreement over Brexit, and his power to use whatever state money to build new tech is diminished, he knows that the EU would be left alone, building new Customs at the edge of Southern Ireland. The Brits are not going to do it. Neither will the Unionists. Boris is of course hostile anyway to the Nationalists in Northern Ireland.)
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