I'm reading Janis Mimura's 'Planning for Empire' right now. It's a fascinating book about the political/economic ideas of 'fascist' technocrats in 1930s and wartime Japan. What's interesting is they saw the shift away from a capitalist economy and liberal state as tech-induced.
The industrial economy, with its massive bureaucratic enterprises, was seen as essentially 'post-capitalist'. The distinction between government and industry was being blurred. The 'night watchman state' no longer made sense.
What's interesting is that you can see 'neoliberalism', globalization, and everything else that came after the war (including mass migration) as a deliberate attempt to undermine this alternative post-capitalist vision (which came in both left- and right-wing flavors).
Globalization is about making autarky impossible. No one country has all the 'pieces' to form an autarkic industrial state. 'Neoliberalism' created a barrier between private and public by emphasizing finance as a mediating layer. Domestic policy aims at breaking solidarity.
We live in a system that was created in order to maintain liberal hegemony globally after WW2, which is in turn based on the system of empire prior to the war. It's understandable that world war would give rise to something like this, but it's a dead end.
The question is: How do we chart a course out of this situation without a repeat of the early 20th century? We achieved stability at the cost of collective ambition. The world as it is has no future but a slow, spiritless decline.
I think the issue is that liberalism left us with an inadequate account of society. What's striking with these Japanese technocrats is that they're sophisticated thinkers when it comes to tech and economics, but when it comes to culture they just go along with the rabble-rousers.
This is what I think happened in the early 20th century: politicians, bureaucrats, academics, technologists, etc, had all reached 'post-capitalist' conclusions, but lacking any sophisticated social understanding, they eventually threw in with populists and revolutionaries.
These early 20th century totalitarian regimes, left and right, were created by a imbalance in our knowledge and that imbalance is still with us. Ultimately, this was because the dominant ideology (liberalism), then and now, rests on an absurd social ontology.
