1/28/2021 American Capitalism Is Working — That’s the Problem

American Capitalism Is Working — That’s

the Problem
BY
NICOLE ASCHOFF

The United States is not a failed state — just ask any American capitalist. But we
desperately need something better for everyone else.

The United States is the richest, most powerful nation in the world. But these days, failure, not
success, is the word most associated with it.

Writing in the Atlantic, George Packer said, “Every morning in the endless month of March,
Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.” Our national response to the
coronavirus pandemic, Packer contended, has forced us to ask questions we’ve never before had
to ask, such as, “Are we still capable of self-government?”

In an interview with Salon, economist Richard D. Wol compared America to “a patient who
has had a really bad cancer or a heart attack, and is now kept alive with tubes and chemicals and
all the rest of it. He is not dead, but is in deep trouble.”

Tom Engelhardt even suggested in the Nation that we might need a new term for the
contradiction that is America. The United States may be rich and powerful, he argued, but it “is
also afloat in a sea of autocratic, climate-changing, economic, military, and police carnage that
should qualify it as distinctly third world as well.” Perhaps “fourth world,” to capture the fact
that we are “potentially the most powerful, wealthiest failed state on the planet.”

It certainly feels like we’re failing. What kind of state deploys the National Guard to menace
peaceful protesters while elderly people are being decimated by COVID-19 and forest fires are
raging? What kind of state forces its nurses and doctors to work without proper protective
equipment? Or allows its people to go hungry and get evicted, while handing out trillions to the
wealthiest few amid a nationwide crisis?

Americans are right to be furious at the Trump administration’s ineptitude and willingness to
dump the costs of the coronavirus pandemic onto working people. But despite its obvious
failures, the United States is not a failed state — and why this distinction matters goes beyond

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semantics. Diagnosis shapes response. If we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess, we need a
clearer picture of what is broken and how to begin fixing it.

The Sum of All Failures

Even among the observers cited above, there is broad disagreement on the path that led the
United States from capitalist success story to alleged basket case. Wol thinks America has
been a terminally ill patient since the postwar boom ended in the 1970s. Packer thinks America
is in the midst of a cyclical “unwinding” punctuated by major crises. Engelhardt blames post–
Cold War hubris.

There is remarkable agreement, however, on the end point — America as failed state. This
consensus is a bit surprising, given the history of the term.

The term “failed state” came into use after the collapse of Somalia. In 1994, the CIA created the
State Failure Task Force to work out the causes of state failure. A few years later, the Clinton
administration declared a new foreign policy emphasis that advocated humanitarian,
diplomatic, economic, military, and various other flavors of imperialist intervention to
purportedly rescue and fix failed states.

Then 9/11 happened, pushing the issue of failed states into the mainstream. Afghanistan,
designated a failed state under Taliban leadership, had harbored Al-Qaeda. Policymakers and
elected officials warned that failed states were dangerous, that they created lawless playgrounds
where terrorists and other ne’er-do-wells thrived. George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security
Strategy announced that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than by failing
states.” In his 2004 book State-Building, Francis Fukuyama deemed weak and failed states “the
single most important problem for the international order.”

When did a state become a failed state? Harvard University’s Robert I. Rotberg o ered a list of
political goods that successful states provide their residents: security, an independent judiciary
and a predictable system for adjudicating disputes, the ability to participate in the political
system, medical and health care, schools and educational instruction, good infrastructure
(physical, communications, commerce), a sound money and banking system, a free civil society
and entrepreneurship opportunities, and environmental protection.

Failed states were states that couldn’t provide these political goods, that had become subsumed
by violence, corruption, and dysfunction. Lists of countries, many of them former colonies,
were produced (Angola, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, East Timor, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and

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Sudan, to name a few) and held up as examples of “classical failed and collapsed states.”
Restoring order in these broken states became a matter of national security; indeed, the
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were sold in part as state-building initiatives.

But as the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close, the concept lost its luster. It
had become painfully obvious, after countless lives were destroyed and trillions of dollars
wasted, that the United States wasn’t very good at state-building. Moreover, scholars decided
that the term itself yielded little of theoretical value, reflecting, as Charles T. Call noted, “the
schoolmarm’s scorecard according to linear index defined by a univocal Weberian endstate.” In
his 2006 book Failed States, Noam Chomsky used the term as little more than a throwaway foil
to point out that honest observers would have “little difficulty in finding the characteristics of
‘failed states’ right at home” in the United States.

So why is the term being revived today?

No doubt, things are bad in America. Income and wealth inequality have widened considerably
over the past four decades, and many indicators show a deteriorating quality of life for poor and
working-class people. The United States has dropped to the twenty-eighth position on the
global Social Progress Index (down from nineteenth in 2011), and a Pew Research Center poll of
how people in thirteen countries view America shows global regard for the stars and stripes at
an all-time low. Much of the country’s infrastructure needs upgrading; housing and food
insecurity is persistent; millions lack access to high-quality, a ordable medical care; education
has become more segregated and expensive; and police violence is a major problem. On top of
all this, the country is being ravaged by a viral pandemic and its accompanying economic, social,
and political fallout.

Nonetheless, the United States doesn’t fit the definition of a failed state as the term has
traditionally been used. The dollar hasn’t become worthless paper, and the economy hasn’t
collapsed. The country hasn’t split into clashing states ruled by warlords or been torn asunder
by civil strife. Rule of law and the judiciary remain robust, and government institutions aren’t
hobbled by corruption. Hospitals and schools function, for the most part. Planes fly, the lights
turn on, the mail gets delivered, and highways are easily traversable.

Is the current popularity of the term simply a shorthand, used to underscore the ineptitude and
inadequacy of the US government’s response to the coronavirus? Is it just an evocative label to
signify the depths of our disgust for how low President Trump has brought us, to capture the
taste of our collective despair as we try to imagine what the next four years hold?

Perhaps. But we should be cautious about throwing it around. Referring to America as a failed
state can obscure both the nature of the crisis at hand and the demands democratic socialists
should be making to get someplace better.

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Great Success

Part of the confusion lies in how the role of the state is imagined in popular accounts. Rotberg,
in delineating the rubric for a failed state, relied on a widely shared belief that “the
responsibility of a nation-state [is] to maximize the well-being and personal prosperity of all of
its citizens.” This isn’t wrong. States must ensure order and welfare, broadly speaking, in order
to retain legitimacy. But in capitalism, a greater determination of legitimacy is how well the
state protects and nurtures capital accumulation.

And in its role facilitating capital accumulation, the US state is a great success. Over the past
half-century, it has proven itself quite nimble at creating the conditions for American
corporations to thrive, both at home and abroad. Trade agreements, taxpayer-funded research,
deregulation, sweetheart tax deals, and a wholesale attack on the social safety net and organized
labor have revived the conditions for profit-making again and again.

At the same time, the US state and its elected officials have been willing and able partners for
elites seeking to protect their interests. Like corporations, America’s millionaires and
billionaires have enjoyed an open door to power, achieving tax breaks and many other benefits
through legislation tailored precisely to the needs of the ruling class.

Even during the coronavirus pandemic, the US state has shown its mettle in protecting the
interests of capital. The government made little e ort to supply its health care workers with
protective equipment, to establish a nationwide testing program, or to ensure access to health
care, food, and housing for Americans impacted by the outbreak — but the Federal Reserve and
the Treasury Department deftly maneuvered to calm the markets, pumping trillions of dollars
into Wall Street through bailouts, grants, and bond purchases, as well as promises to keep
interest rates low indefinitely.

A Financial Times story illuminates the results of this maneuvering. Trading volumes in the
spring were six times higher than normal, as global elites took advantage of surging stock prices.
In Monaco, a popular coronavirus refuge, wealthy foreigners “spent much of their time
frantically trading their portfolios.” “[W]e will have a very good year,” commented one private
banker.

That the state failed to provide the same financial and social protection for working families,
aside from a short-lived federal unemployment subsidy and an ill-conceived Paycheck
Protection Program, was not a result of incapacity or generalized failure. It is the response of a
state that has been fine-tuned to meet the needs of the country’s wealthiest citizens and
corporations, and to ignore or minimize the needs of ordinary people. As Nicos Poulantzas

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argued long ago, the state is not a static or intrinsic entity; it’s a dynamic, historically grounded
relationship of class forces.

If we see America as a failed state on the verge of disintegration, collapse, or slide into
dictatorship, our policy goals will reflect that focus. If we accept that we live in a failed state,
how do we go about fixing it?

We might, like Engelhardt and many others, view getting Trump out of office as the top
priority. Or, like Packer, we might emphasize the need to take citizenship seriously and value
solidarity. These are worthy goals. But, on the whole, fixing a failed state is a nebulous, often
apolitical project.

In this moment, a clearer vision of renewal is both necessary and possible when we focus on who
and what the US state directs its resources and energies toward, rather than whether or not it
has lost its capacity to rule.

Framing the problem this way highlights the goals of democratization, decommodification, and
redistribution. It underscores the need to build working-class institutions capable of
transforming the state itself into an institution that works for ordinary people.

It is also a reminder that if we want a state that doesn’t fail us, we’ll have to fight for one.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicole Aschoff is on the editorial board at Jacobin. She is the author of The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and
Resistance in the New Gilded Age and The New Prophets of Capital .

FILED UNDER
UNITED STATES
ECONOMY / CAPITAL / INEQUALITY

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