Game theory in the Cool Zone

or, we're fucked, but not in that way

Although its basic principles were established as early as the sixteenth century, so-called Game Theory was developed by Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann, fifteen years or so before his involvement on the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear weapon during the Second World War. After the war, von Neumann’s research was picked up by the RAND corporation during the Cold War era push to understand the logics of nuclear exchange, leading the US Security State to adopt the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (cheekily acronymed as MAD), which suggests no rational actors would ever engage in a nuclear first-strike if the consequence would result in the obliteration of their own territory.

I know what was actually going through your mind while you read all that historical minutiae. To most of us who have long forgotten the lectures we slept through during freshman year Political Science courses, “Game Theory” on the 2024 internet signifies the hubris of early #resistance-era posting embodied in that infamous 2016 Twitter thread from Eric Garland, basement bass player turned blogger, “intelligence professional,” and Russiagate paranoiac. Garland’s now-embarrassing thread riled up the liberal commentariat fresh off the sting of an unexpected Hillary loss (Mother Jones EIC Clara Jeffrey called it the “Federalist Paper for 2016”) and it was the first in a long string of careers made off the panic of Americans with disposable income and an addiction to the news, who had convinced themselves they had just woken up in Germany in 1934.

Garland’s key claim at the time was that when understood correctly, every strange headline voters had read over the past few months of the 2016 election was evidence that Trump’s victory was all Russia’s doing, one, and two, that the Democrats actually weren’t caught off guard, but were secretly doing, like, quantum physics equations in the back room of some DC restaurant while Trump stumbled into the trap they had set.

Many sharp postmortems on Garland’s thread have been written in the years since its posting, and those strange few years of the American liberal media have been mercilessly excoriated by people with far better insight and wit than me. But I do think it’s interesting to note that the origin of Game Theory as a national security doctrine was entirely structured around the mere possibility of a nuclear exchange that never actually took place. When you learn about Game Theory and nuclear deterrence in your freshman college Political Science course, the professor typically draws a four-windowed square on the whiteboard and explains the prisoner’s dilemma with various abstractions as variables—a murderer’s accomplice in solitary in one cell, a detective interrogator asking questions to Suspect A about the robbery he already knows the answers to in another. In a sense, this is the same thing that happened in the Cold War. Game Theory was just an abstraction. I hate to admit it but Garland was actually right: Obama and Clinton and Joe Biden and eventually Kamala Harris were doing Game Theory, insofar as Game Theory is a bunch of bureaucrats sitting around a room and pontificating on more and more abstract thought experiments while the rest of us push buttons like “don’t launch the bomb” or “calculate total” on a shopper’s cart filled with groceries. Schrödinger’s lib.

But I digress. The worst has happened, again. I thought I’d be more upset if Trump won the 2024 election than I actually am at the moment, although I guess “upset” might not be the best way to phrase it. Right now I kind of feel like Kirsten Dunst’s character in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). The film opens with Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg playing two sisters who couldn’t be more opposite one another—Dunst’s happy wedding night is experienced by her as a quiet suffering, while her sister is visibly annoyed that she can’t seem to keep it together in front of her friends and family.

As these things typically go, it turns out a rogue planet has somehow left the orbit of its sun and is headed on a crash course to destroy all life on planet Earth (thankfully the VFX crew didn’t make the planet orange). At this moment, the sisters’ affect inverts—Gainsbourg descends into an anxiety-ridden spiral facing her certain demise, while Dunst is kind of like hey I found the wine! and decides to built a ramshackle tent to ride it all out. The movie ends and everyone dies, and that’s not really where I’m going with all this, but It Do Be Like That Sometimes, as they say.

I don’t think the world is going to end over this, at least not anymore than was likely under the Biden State Department’s total green light to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the obvious response from Arab states in the region. We were headed for this anyway, and it’s honestly one of the reasons I didn’t have many ethical qualms with voting for Harris, even in a safe blue state. Neoliberalism is over—dead, buried in the ground—and the story of the past 16 years has essentially been one in which its consequences become more and more inescapable while one little chunk of elites figures it out here, and another, there. If the Trump years taught liberals all the wrong lessons, that one more Robin DiAngelo workplace DEI training would end racism better than “breaking up the banks” ever could (I could list anecdotes like this all day but nobody wants to read that), COVID-19’s shock to the global economy forced the Democratic party to begrudgingly continue some of Trump’s emergency juicing of the economy to avoid disaster. Thanks to what I take to be a staffing bottleneck in the early days of Biden’s administration, it appeared for a moment like the Democrats had finally turned the page on their ideological commitment to NAFTA Mindset. Even the New Left Review was publishing tepid interest in what had come to be called Bidenomics at this point! Of course they still publish Franco Moretti, so make of that what you will.

We all know what happened next: the contradictions holding the post-Cold War geopolitical order together started to fracture into shooting wars in areas where (gasp) white people live, and right-wing parties began winning elections in countries that had experienced post-COVID inflation (any analysis of Trump’s victory last night that doesn’t take this fact into account isn’t worth listening to). But then a strange thing happened, as someone likes to say: neoliberalism didn’t rear its head back from the dead. With the COVID emergency mostly in the rearview mirror—and despite what you hear from doomers online it is an undeniable truth that the US came out of the crisis in far better shape than its peer Western nations—Biden turned his focus to “rebuilding the postwar order” in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza. Adam Tooze has recently taken to calling what remains of Bidenomics as “MAGA for thinking people,” and he’s right. I think that we on the left are far too sanguine about the apparent reawakened appetite for The Worker as a discursive target for both parties when both are clearly acting in preparation with some kind of war with China in the not too distant future.

Neoliberalism long ago lost its legitimacy as an ideological project, and last night it suffered what I hope to be its final loss at the ballot box as the Democrats ran the same exact playbook as 2016. I know many of you are bristling at my use of the term here, although I’ve always taken “neoliberalism” to be more of a periodizing concept as well as a discursive structure that posits a particular political economic vision for how society should be organized as a response to the vagaries of the cycle of capital accumulation. Fellow Marxists correctly note that “it’s all capitalism,” but in the next sentence will go on to quote from Lenin’s own articulation of capitalism as a process that unfolds in stages, or celebrate the recently departed Fredric Jameson and forget that he told us that one “cannot not periodize” (by the way, sign up for our reading group!). I will admit I shared some kind of collective, naive hope during the Bernie campaigns, although I was under no illusions of an awaiting utopia or anything like that. A friend once told me that Marxists love to feel revolutionary possibility in situations they don’t realize have already been lost, then turn to reading the Laws of History in the wake of the inevitable failure. I will admit I did just that in 2020 to try and make sense of what the hell was going on, and while it didn’t make me feel any better, I did feel like I finally understood when we were for the first time in a long time.

As far as I can tell, I take the debate between smart leftists to look something like this. On the one hand we have what we might call the Marxist Economic School, which cleaves into various factions based on three distinct but overlapping theories generally built out of versions of Marx’s argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: 1. Robert Brenner’s claim that the global economy has been in a “Long Downturn” since the mid-1960s, 2. Those that follow Giovanni Arrighi’s cyclical argument from The Long Twentieth Century that uses Marx’s circuit of capital (where Money capital is converted to Commodities, which are then sold for profit to be invested back into Money capital, or M prime) as a theory of history, one that can map the history of capitalism’s loci of hegemony as it unfolded across the world since the onset of European modernity, and finally, 3. The Value Form Marxists, all of whom generally have agreeable readings of the first two but, I’ll be perfectly honest, get so caught up in ontologizing Value as this kind of spectral, metaphysical presence that I kind of tap out whenever I try to read them. This is what happens when you hide Marxism in the English department for thirty years, people.

The second tendency is a much more heterogenous group that I might call Liberal Socialists or something like this, although many in this group would bristle at the descriptor. Still, I think that “socialism” has basically come to mean in its post-Cold War environment what “left liberalism” used to mean, or even just Keynesianism tout court. This is in no small part Bernie’s doing, along with social media trends (which is fine, that’s the world we live in now, no use complaining about it). But it also includes very smart people like Adam Tooze and think tank folks who staff Actually Existing Institutions and understand how the government works, and would laugh many value form Marxists out of a room and with good reason. Their disagreements with Marxists range from silly reasons like “I’m not a Marxist” (just wait), or that they haven’t read any of it, or that Marxism ended with the Soviet Union, or something like this, which, I mean, they aren’t wrong. But there are also really interesting debates between these first two camps as to whether or not the profit rate is actually falling or not, which I’m not smart enough to land on one side or the other beyond noting that the Marxists seem to have a far better account for all the other stuff, so I tend to trust them more. If the Marxists are doing things like grounding their readings of the present on the central contradictions of capitalist accumulation, and the liberal socialists hold out hope for a Green New Deal and a principled opposition to a post-neoliberal Military Keynesianism, both seem to agree that we are at something like a key moment of historical rupture in which whatever happens next will be unlike anything anyone alive has ever experienced.

Opposite these two camps are our comrades in what I might call the Anti-Imperialist Umbrella. By no means ideologically coherent and with a collection of vastly distinct tendencies of praxis, analysis, commitments, and fashion choices, nothing I am about to type is meant as a blanket statement of any kind, so please don’t yell at me. Some of the most principled leftists I have ever met and whom I respect head to toe fall under this camp, but so do twenty-two year old posters who listened to a podcast about Domenico Losurdo and think that being a Marxist-Leninist is when you put a hammer and sickle in your bio and not, yknow, being a card-carrying member of an organization that would send the FBI to your door before you finish reading this article. The Anti-Imperialist leftists are absolutely correct in their denunciation of US Empire and what it actually looks like to enforce the global economic and political system that allows a plurality of Americans to feel like $6 Cheetos are reason enough to make abortion illegal. They have been on the front lines of drawing attention to the genocide in Gaza, and I get irritated when liberals point to likely CIA plants like Jackson Hinkle or Haz and the “MAGA Communist” freaks as exemplars of this group when what’s really happening there is that you can become a millionaire on the internet if you have brain poisoning, we don’t have any organized or coherent leftist institutions in this country, and everyone is hopeless and upset about the situation we find ourselves in with no plans to do anything about it.

Nobody has any idea how to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza and all of our so-called liberal institutions are both failing (the UN, liberal Jewish organizations, the EU) or complicit with a frown because That’s Just The Cost Of Global Hegemony (which isn’t incorrect!). We here in the imperial core either spend hours every day mainlining nightmarish gore on our phones or pretend it isn’t happening because it isn’t happening to us, and the game is on. Some have already taken to claim that Harris lost last night because she didn’t stop the War in Gaza, which I take to be a misreading due in part to the fact that Harris underperformed in the suburbs from ostensible moderates who drive their SUVs to Costco every weekend as well as Latino voters and any other number of demographics the Democrats thought owed them votes due to not being The Bad Man. Of course Gaza didn’t help, but let’s be real, Americans can’t be both a nation of uneducated passive consumers AND a principled group making ethical decisions with coherent logic in order to articulate a specific policy proposal, and they are certainly the former. Half the electorate thought Harris was “too liberal,” which of course is some vague signifier resulting from a collision of signifieds such as “Black” and “Woman” and “California,” but also a reminder that a sizable plurality of the country thinks we are insane people. There is no future for the left in this country until we can come to terms with that.

My real issue with the Anti-Imperialist Umbrella is simply that they do not seem to understand much about the realities of our historical moment and what it means for the left as a necessary agent in history. Marxists in this group read Lenin as if our conditions are remotely comparable to the ones faced by an illiterate, pre-industrial and ethnically-heterogenous agrarian society living under a monarchy that was collapsing due to a world war. Anti-colonial movements in the twentieth century were fighting the kind of colonialism that carried guns, and they had revolutions, and killed people. Today the plan seems to be posting and drawing police to demonstrations or occupations only to get arrested and then………? Everyone made fun of Hillary for her three-point plan to defeat ISIS in 2016 but she at least came up with a second part of the plan.

I say all of this not to sound like some liberal spouting a holier-than-thou condemnation of protest (far from it—in total solidarity with the ongoing, courageous student movements across the country), but rather as a gut feeling that what’s really happening is a bunch of symptoms, symptoms of a left that has figured out all the problems facing the world but doesn’t have the slightest clue as to what to do about them. Nothing in that statement is new, but what I do think that its typical deployment is usually followed by a vague overemphasis on The Power Of The Political Imaginary rather than the sober realization that we are stuck in what Kojin Katarani has called the Borromean Knot of Capital/Nation/State, three overlapping and interconnected forces that impose themselves on us not just in all aspects of our lives, but in our ability to do anything about any of them. Bernie Sanders had some ideas about how to deal with Capital’s complete capture of the social, but the State and its institutions threw up impenetrable barriers that no amount of organizing could possibly overcome. Union organizing is a light in these dark times as labor, from every political tendency, is fed up with fifty years of neoliberalism. But it’s entirely possible the NLRB will be dissolved under Trump’s second administration, and the right figured out how to mobilize the idea of the Nation as a repository for class consciousness (when it’s not being ignored because The Game Is On). And if you think all that is bad, just wait for war with China!

Still, I think we are less screwed than we feel right now. Rounding out my 30,000 foot view of American Liberalism (sorry leftists, that’s what we all are) might be a long analysis of who we love to pejoratively call The Libs, but I don’t think that’s particularly useful in the moment, despite how cathartic it might feel. I think it’s actually good that we are very likely not getting another Hamilton moment, and while MSNBC is going to be spouting their own election conspiracy theories any day now, the yard sign, Elizabeth Warren musical crowd are scared and feeling perhaps even more than 2016 all the stuff we’ve been saying about the Democrats since Obama blew it (or if you are older than I am, Clinton, or maybe 1968 or what have you). Moments like these force us into a coalition with liberals, and I really think we should resist the idea of fracturing with communities rather than sclerotic institutions or political interest groups, who must be rejected, and decisively. Everyone is saying stuff like “this will be the last election ever” and I think that is a result of Americans not having a living memory of a war on our soil and receiving all their political education from 1984 and Timothy Snyder. Just look at Eastern Europe to see what elections look like under regimes like the one Trump wants to be in. At the same time, realize that America does not have a century of total social repression. We have been pretty good at keeping our repression limited to Black people and the economically immiserated over the years, and white liberals are not going to be happy about any of what’s coming. We can pretend we are in a seminar room and Well Actually their understanding of history to make them feel ashamed for not reading the right books and being Privileged, OR we could treat it as an opportunity to build solidarity and not limit their political imaginations to simply voting in “local elections” (which we should all do, of course, but that’s become the go-to answer for what to do when shit goes south and even that is never enough).

No, the reason I’m less concerned than I expected to be is that I think we have an opportunity if not to materially do anything about any of this—I’m an academic who gets anxiety attacks from knocking on doors when canvassing, I’m no expert on political praxis!—then at least to understand exactly when we are, what forces are moving where beneath our feet, and to begin our work with a better analysis than all the mumbo jumbo that led to a decade of lost work. Mike Davis’ final piece for New Left Review is still for my money the authoritative read on the zeitgeist, and in a way, I’m kind of glad he’s not around to see what’s coming. If you spend time in leftist literary or social media circles, you have seen the quotes repeated ad nauseam: “Does hegemony require a grand design?” “We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History,’’ “Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born.” But this, to me, seems to be just as important an insight:

In part this is the victory of pathological presentism, making all calculations on the basis of short-term bottom-lines in order to allow the super-rich to consume all the good things of the earth within their lifetimes. (Michel Aglietta in his recent Capitalisme: Le temps des ruptures emphasises the unprecedented character of the new sacrificial generational divide.) Greed has become radicalized to the extent that it no longer needs political thinkers and organic intellectuals, just Fox News and bandwidth. In the worst-case scenario, Elon Musk will simply lead a billionaire migration off planet.

There are going to be important distinctions between this Trump term and the last one; the lack of institutional guard rails that will result from what some have taken to be “serious” Republicans who now refuse to work with him, a more rigid hold on the courts and judiciary, even just the nature by which he might feel vindictive or his followers emboldened by more organization in the years since the carnival that was January 6th. And some of the Marxists from group one up there will remind us that yes, this is still capitalism, that logic will continue on and on, that he governed like a typical business-friendly Republican which will not change this time around albeit for a more aggressive assertion of state repression against his enemies.

But what Davis is identifying here is not some abstraction like “the Value Form” that mutely compels all under capitalism towards the general law of accumulation, but rather specific interests that are being deployed by specific institutions. While the Marxists in group one may understand history and the centrality of Capital as a historical apparatus far better than the liberal socialists of group two, the latter actually read the financial press from time to time to see what Capital is saying. I’ve never understood why so many Marxists today can’t be bothered to do this; I think it is in part because it makes them feel icky, which I understand, but it might also be because many of them just don’t care, or think it is less important than wishcasting bricks through windows, leading them to slip into the chaos and impotence of group three. Marxism isn’t disproven because the conditions for a dialectically-induced revolution of workers brought together by the process of industrialization has come and gone, but that possibility is over and the sooner we realize that the better. Why are we spending all of our time fantasizing about something that is never going to happen in the way we think it will on apps that are monitored by Capital and the State? If you believe as I do that the ultimate authority in the world is Capital, and that the modern nation-state in its twenty-first century form is effectively a post-modern apparatus designed to facilitate its flow across the globe with localized articulations designed to better serve the capitalists within each nation-state and their interests, then you should probably pay attention to what those capitalists are actually saying. Everyone loves to throw around the term “materialism” now as a general left wing signifier but nobody knows what it means anymore. There’s nothing more material than the actual existence and interests of the specific capitalists who exist, today, and the groups of people who live underneath their rule. Materialism isn’t just when There Are Rich Guys, and “class” is a much more complicated abstraction than it was in the nineteenth century as capitalism has spread to every corner of the globe and into the lives of every individual on the planet.

Some Marxists and the Anti-Imperialist Umbrella have a tendency to let their analysis slip into these simple abstractions. Oh they want you to do this. Capital wants this, or Empire does that, while the idealized countervailing forces range from Putin to Assad or just a local co-op serving fair trade coffee. But have any of them ever read what The Wall Street Journal says about Elon Musk? The WSJ fucking hates Elon Musk! They ran hard with the stuff about his ties to Putin and reported exclusively on his shaky finances before the election. Capital may be “mutely compelled” to accumulate but did we all forget that capitalists are in competition with other capitalists?!?!!?!?! Elon Musk and Trump have both made Reddit or Truth Social-brained overtures to the Ron Paul style idea of getting rid of the Federal Reserve altogether. Do you think that Jeff Bezos—who invited Fed Chair Jerome Powell to a party in 2020 with Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—wants the dollar to be pegged to crypto? Trump has visions of mass deportations and while it seems clear that the Democrats were going to do it for him with a frown had Harris won, the real reason the federal government is worried about immigration is only in part because of racist blood-and-soil anxieties that dipshit podcasters goad their subscribers into feeling through creative language that works its way up to cretins in Congress like Jim Jordan and J.D. Vance. It’s because the domestic labor force has been transformed since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and global instability and the forthcoming climate refugee crisis pose serious problems for the smooth functioning of markets in an economy that still hasn’t figured out how to organize itself beyond the need to cheaply allow goods and capital to move across borders and siphon those profits up to monopolists to gamble on futures trading. I’m sure some capitalists are perfectly happy with forcing Americans who complain about things like “wages” or “healthcare” into picking strawberries for a living, but you do realize that Driscoll’s isn’t just a label on a package but an actual company run by an actual CEO, who has a name, right? I’m not saying Mark Cuban is going to lead the #resistance or something but that Borromean knot goes both ways: much of capital is going to be lobbying hard against Trump’s proposals (it already happened in 2017!), and meanwhile the Musks of the world are going to be going on podcasts with white rappers who have face tattoos in lieu of the cabinet meetings he’s supposed to be attending.

It remains just as true as it did in the alternate timeline where President Harris won last night that the American cycle of accumulation reached a crisis point in the mid-1970s, and that the neoliberal boom that sustained the United States through the end of the Cold War and into the twenty-first century was a financial mirage to give specific capitalists one last hit off the bottle before going to rehab. Whether or not Brenner is right and the entire global economy has reached that point is beyond my pay grade, but even Obama learned quickly that there’s no way out of this knot. You and I are about to see things we have never seen before, but we are also still living in the imperial core in the country that decides the value of every other country’s currency. The nightmarish social policies that are probably waiting down the pipeline for all of us, distributed unequally but no less totalizing in their effects, will need to be creatively resisted, but the bill came due a long time ago. The good news is that this means that Borromean Knot I mentioned earlier might be loosening a bit: think about how quickly the Trump administration sent checks out to everyone when COVID shut down the economy. They had to do that, and no amount of lecturing from the ghost of Hayek could stop them. That’s what I mean when I say not to catastrophize yourself into a stupor. The realm of possibility has opened its jaws wider than any of us have ever seen, and it goes both ways. In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx famously quipped that “men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered…” We on the left sometimes bring this quote up to remind ourselves that the work continues after a defeat, that the dialectic doesn’t just end but mutates. Well guess what everybody. That quote applies to capitalists, too.

The one thing I do think is true is that nobody under the age of 45 or so will ever trust the Democratic party again. Part of me is happy I no longer have to go around pretending this hollow shell of an institution could manage to keep the worst contradictions from exploding for just another few years, but the irony of the whole thing is that finally, for the first time in my life anyway, it is actually true that there is going to be a real fight for the reins of the party in the wake of this pathetic loss by the stupidest people to ever work in American politics. The boomers and their few elders that hold the vast majority of the wealth in this country and still staff the DNC are on their way out, and the reason why Harris staffed her campaign with Biden’s people despite the long-standing tension between the two camps is because there just isn’t anyone else to run things. It’s ironic that this time we’re going to hear “no, seriously, we can take over the party!” from electoral campaigns and it might be true, in an abstracted Game Theory kind of way, but nobody is in the mood anymore. Good riddance, honestly. Although it sure would be nice if anybody knew what to do next.

In this sense I think it actually isn’t all that silly to suggest that some kind of “Game Theory” is actually at play in the coming years, insofar as a good portion of capital is going to find themselves in an actual prisoner’s dilemma in an attempt to navigate the MAGA Brain Havers on the one hand, a Europe that knows it’s on its own to rebuild resiliency with a looming threat from Putin and his band of mafioso capitalis—er sorry Anti Imperialists on its Eastern borders on the other. And don’t forget China, which some of the Arrighi heads in group one think will stabilize capital’s next phase but is currently facing their own economic mess and conflicting coterie of analysts. Perhaps the better analogy here is not so much the Game Theory that will be practiced by feuding capitalists and their specific interests or every major military in the world, all of whom are decades removed from any serious tradition of combat experience. Perhaps the Game Theory that we are going to be doing is the kind written on the whiteboard by that Poli Sci professor, explaining what theoretically could happen, if Prisoner B doesn’t rat on Prisoner A, who robbed a convenience store, or maybe embezzled some money, or deported 10 million workers, or sunk the tariff plan.

On Twitter last night someone messaged me and asked if I could run through some ideas with them, and I didn’t catch it until later, so I apologize if you’re reading this, but I thought in lieu of all that I’d write something up here. Mostly for myself but also to start conversation rather than post irony online for the first time in my life. In grad school once I had dinner with my advisor and one of his former students at a film festival, and we were all talking about politics and the state of the world over pasta and wine. I hate wine but I was trying to make a good impression. At the time I was re-reading a lot of Mark Fisher as I was in the process writing my exam fields, and I remember this was the point where I was starting to get tired of all his “we can’t imagine an alternative…” stuff, an understandable exhortation from a Gen X white liberal with a memory of the welfare state who had watched the last vestiges of a left dry up under the hegemony of neoliberalism and Adbusters leftism. I made some pithy comment about how he was wrong, that neoliberalism really was ending, just not in the way he thought, because it turns out that it was the Right that was taking it out to pasture. I don’t really remember what either of them said in response but I did pass my exam, and then the real work began afterwards.