In the noncommunist world, the wealthy were taxed not out of class hostility, but in order to finance public goods for society as a whole. 2 These states were “welfare states” in the sense that they sought to provide for the general welfare, rather than to protect or lift up the poor or defend the prerogatives of the rich. 1 Both capitalist and communist accumulation strategies were based on nurturing industrial laborers, who were expected to work for a living, and who, in turn, were told that the state would not only steadily improve their standard of living, but would also cushion them from outrageous misfortune through various forms of social security. During the social modernist era (1945-1971), virtually all states-whether capitalist or communist, industrialized or developmental, great power or postcolonial-aimed to legitimate themselves by serving the interests of middle classes, whose size they sought to expand. Understanding how we arrived at these twin insurgencies requires a brief return to the anterior period. The net result: these transnational insurgencies from above and below are challenging the state’s control over the domestic economy, and destabilizing many of the conventions and assumptions rooted in the Westphalian model of governance. Rather, their aim is simpler: to carve out de facto zones of autonomy for themselves by crippling the state’s ability to constrain their freedom of (primarily economic) action. These modern insurgencies do not wish to destroy the state, since they rely, like parasites, on the state to provide the legacy goods of social welfare: health, education, infrastructure, and so on. Unlike classic 20 th-century insurgents, who sought control over the state apparatus in order to implement social reforms, criminal and plutocratic insurgents do not seek to take over the state. From libertarian activists, to tax haven lawyers, to currency speculators, to mineral extraction magnates, the new global superrich and their hired help are waging a broad-based campaign that aims either to limit the reach and capacity of government tax collectors and regulators, or to manipulate these functions as a tool in their own cutthroat business competition. On the other hand, there exists a plutocratic insurgency, in which globalized elites seek to disengage from traditional national obligations and responsibilities. Drug cartels, human traffickers, computer hackers, counterfeiters, arms dealers, and others exploit the failures of governance systems to build global commercial empires that, in turn, provide them the resources to corrupt, co-opt, or challenge incumbent political actors. On the one hand, there is a series of interconnected criminal insurgencies, in which the global disenfranchised resist, co-opt, and route around states as they seek ways to empower and enrich themselves in the shadows of the global economy. States within the modern global political economy face twin insurgencies, one from below, and another from above. “Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
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