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An unflinching look at the emergence of global capitalist totalitarianism

Toby Rogers
24 hr ago

Over the last few days, I have been devouring C.J. Hopkins latest book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. It is a superb work of political economy documenting the insanity of the last two years. Reading the book is medicine for my soul.

Hopkins is an American playwright who now lives in Germany. I just discovered his Substack in the last few months and it’s fantastic:


CJ Hopkins
The Rise of the New Normal Reich
I told you this part wasn’t going to be pretty. I didn’t think it would get to the point where the Wall Street Journal would go full Buck Turgidson and call on the United States to “show it can win a nuclear war,” but I wasn’t entirely off the mark either. Back in January (i.e., a million years ago), in…
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6 days ago · 197 likes · 72 comments · CJ Hopkins
I suppose one could find all of the essays that are assembled in the book for free online. But it’s so much nicer to have an actual paper book in one’s hands than to stare at the screen. Other essay collections sometimes jump around but this one has a nice coherent through-line and it’s fascinating to watch his thinking develop over time.

His thesis is elegant and spot on. In the introductory chapter he writes:

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the credibility of communism as a viable competing ideology, the global-capitalist power network (or “GloboCap” as I like to call it) launched a global “clear-and-hold” operation, identifying and wiping out pockets of resistance, economically, militarily, and ideologically.

It started in the former Soviet-bloc countries, the Middle East, and Africa in the early 1990s, and expanded throughout most of the rest of the world like an aggressive metastatic cancer during the 15-year-long “Global War on Terror.”

As GloboCap was conducting this clear-and-hold op in far-flung places all around the world, it was also conducting it in the heart of empire, not as dramatically, but just as effectively, gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing society.

Which is all global capitalism knows how to do. GloboCap isn’t a conspiracy of evil individuals with a megalomaniacal vision. It’s a machine. A values-decoding machine. Its function, ideologically speaking, is to eradicate any and all social values that interfere with the flows of capital and replace them all with a single value (i.e. exchange value) rendering everything a commodity, and transforming society into a marketplace.

All of that was going swimmingly for GloboCap until Trump came along with his energized base of Americans who had lost out on jobs and livelihoods because of globalization. So GloboCap quickly retooled the War on Terror(TM) into a War on Populism(TM) — to take out Trump and any other populist movement that threatened global profits including the yellow vest movement in France, Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and the Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns.

Now GloboCap has found the perfect vehicle for accomplishing its totalizing goals — the coronavirus pandemic. Hopkins calls it The New Normal Reich. Because of global trade, surveillance technology, and the destruction of ideological alternatives, the New Normal Reich aims to be the first truly global system of totalitarianism.

Hopkins also offers keen insights into the role of ideology in the new totalitarian scheme:

Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism wore its politics on its sleeve, New Normal totalitarianism presents itself as a non-ideological (i.e. supra-political) reaction to a public health emergency. (p. 209)

It is difficult to fight a system that denies its very existent even while it rapidly assembles a totalizing, inescapable, corporatized Reality(TM). Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” has become global and now includes thrice yearly injections of experimental genetically modified mRNA.