In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with John Milbank about his article “In Triplicate: Britain after Brexit; the World after Coronavirus; Retrospect and Prospect,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
In Triplicate: Britain after Brexit; the World after Coronavirus; Retrospect and Prospect
John Milbank
The Double Pause of Now
Out of the national frying pan, into the global fire. It is already impossible to consider the topic of the future of the United Kingdom after Brexit without taking into account the way in which the Brexit crisis has immediately been overtaken by a worldwide medical catastrophe.
The ironies of fate at work here are of course immense, but they are also multiple. In effect Britain’s exit from the European Union in practical, not formal, terms has been indefinitely suspended. Meanwhile, the primary task of coping with COVID-19 within Continental Europe falls to national governments; the EU is either irrelevant or has proved inadequate, with its financial role and the timing of its application already disputed between the Teutonic north and the Latin south. Nevertheless, some inter-Continental cooperation in terms of health resources is proving crucial.
These ironic contrasts open upon a wider paradox that tends to confirm unambiguously neither the biases of “populists” nor the biases of individualistic globalizers. We are forced into protective isolation: as individuals, as families, as immediate localities, as nations. Yet at the same time we are also compelled to rely much more immediately upon connectivity in every sense—between people, between households, between businesses, between the private and the public sector, and between nations.
So on the one hand this is a conservative and a communitarian moment. Friendship is proving after all a more immediate exigency of economic survival than trucking and trading, in defiance of Adam Smith. The so-recently despised family is proving to be all that most of us are left with or stuck with, depending on your prejudice or experience. Suddenly, roaming abroad on behalf of enterprise is no longer an option, and spontaneous self-government is starting to arise in both urban and rural localities. Governments are once more talking with unions as well as business leaders. Borders between countries have been closed, and now the so-recently despised nation-state and government action are all that stand between most people and chaos or even extinction.
On the other hand, this is also a moment when the so-recently despised “enlightenment” appears obviously indispensable. Already, those Brexiteer business leaders initially ready to be skeptical about science and expertise have been forced to backtrack. Already, the leaders of China and the United States have been forced to stop trading insults and get on the phone to each other. If it is true that the weakening of state and local government under neoliberalism has caught us badly prepared for the current crisis, then it is also true that the weakening of international political cooperation under both neoliberalism and the anti-globalizing reaction against it has impaired a coordinated global response.
Potentially, then, both liberal globalizers and post-liberal “social nativists” ought to be chastened by the arrival of a global pandemic. Potentially, its aftermath should open the possibility of new global and national settlements somewhat akin to those that followed upon World War II. Yet we cannot rule out the opposite: a resumption of the sterile battle between these two dominant tendencies more akin to the resumption of unqualified liberal imperialism versus militaristic nationalism that ensued upon the ending of the First World War. To this question I will eventually return.
Meanwhile, enforced isolation and inactivity for some (though not for so many others) provides a chance to reflect again upon the causes of Brexit, but now in a more global context, which includes the preconditions for the emergence of a global pandemic such as we are now facing. Only against the background of that reflection can we possibly think about the way forward for the United Kingdom, Europe, and even the world.
The Altered Normal
What has now become overwhelmingly clear is that Brexit was only the local manifestation of a global upheaval and discontent also manifest as the triumph of Donald Trump in the United States and the rise of national-populist or social-nativist parties everywhere, from Europe to Brazil to India. If we are too fixated on the specifically British rendering of this critical shift, then we are likely to miss just how fundamental an event Brexit really is—far exceeding its occasion and the immediate question of Britain’s relationship to Continental Europe.
The core element of the upheaval concerns the political manifestation of mass unease with the increasingly oligarchic power exercised by the wealthier, more highly educated, dominant social classes. Not only does this unease take the form of rejecting the agenda of the economic liberalism of the Right; it also takes the form of rejecting the agenda of the cultural liberalism of the Left, along with its fundamentally individualist construal of redistribution as focused upon increasing equality of opportunity. Thus, almost everywhere an increasing dislike of the global free market has failed to redound to the advantage of social democratic parties, which have, indeed, often ceased to exist.
To a degree this is explicable by their desertion of any genuine social democratic agenda of progressive taxation, regulation of business, and support for trade unions. Yet even where such policies are again espoused, as by the Corbynite Labour Party, they tend not to prove sufficiently popular. Votes go rather to social-nativist parties, often of the Right, which combine elements of redistribution with policies to strengthen the family, to limit immigration, and to sustain national and local cultural identity. Equivalently, approaches based primarily upon the claim rights of individuals and of diverse racial, gender, and sexual-orientation groups are rejected.
Too easily, in the face of this development, left-wing parties still assume the priority of the economic and suggest that the economically abandoned have been diverted into an espousal of prejudice and quasi-fascism. Yet this is to forget far too quickly elements that were part of even social democratic agendas until relatively recently. In the postwar years it was these agendas, alongside Christian democratic ones, that sought to shore up the family against the blandishments of the capitalist workplace and seductive advertising. Right up to the late twentieth century, it was these agendas that often sought to limit immigration in order to restrict “labor arbitrage”—that is, the exploitation by capital of incoming workforces prepared to work longer hours for less money and to live in worse housing conditions, which then impacts badly upon already resident workers. Yet today the Labour Party, for example, tries to deny the very clear evidence of this double injustice throughout the land—a factor very much to the fore in bringing about the vote to leave the EU. It is entirely bizarre for a supposedly socialist party to be suspicious (like Jeremy Corbyn) of the free flow of capital goods and labor and yet not of the free flow of people with which it is naturally associated for a capitalist logic.
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It seems so important, as we move beyond neo-liberalism to a Post-Liberal world that potential new policy directions/suggestions be subjected to the closest scrutiny and debate–for example the advocacy of the systematic taxing of economic rents (however defined) and the potential power imbalance difficulties involved in attempting a successful implementation of this path in comparison with, what I would argue is a easier option, calling for the establishment of small local banks ( both non-profit and for-profit) that would involve the use of market mechanisms as well as clever guidance for the distribution of money and credit to small businesses.
This second path assumes the following about the nature of banking (with all of the following ideas coming from the prolific writings of Richard A. Werner).
Banks, in creating credit and money simply reclassify their liabilities from what should be an account payable to a customer deposit.
The borrower is given the erroneous impression that the bank has transferred money from its capital, reserves of other accounts to the borrowers account (as indeed major theories of banking (like financial intermediation and fractional reserve theories erroneously claim) but in reality this is not the case. Neither the bank nor the customer deposited any money from outside the bank in order to make the deposit in the borrowers account–there was no depositing of any funds. The banks liability is simply renamed a “bank deposit” by the bank.
Such bank deposits are then defined by central banks as being part of the official money supply (M1, M2, M3 or M4). This process confirms that banks create money when they grant a loan. They invent a fictitious customer deposit, which the central bank and other users of the monetary system consider to be money, indistinguishable from real deposits. Thus banks do not just grant credits, they create credit and simultaneously they create money.
What if the average American or British citizen realized that banks create money, that they could actually go out and create local not-for-profit and local for-profit banks, for the benefit of ordinary people and the local community?
No wonder central banks are behind many so-called “monetary reform movements” trying to abolish bank credit creation altogether.