We are familiar with the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’. We might be familiar with the ‘State-Finance Nexus’. But what do we know about the ‘Intelligence-IT-Media complex’, aside from it being a bit of a mouthful? Well, to understand its distinctive features one has to grasp the profound reconfiguration of our political life that is currently taking place. Political/ideological realignments are demanding times, and we are in the middle of one right now. This means we must prepare ourselves for some disturbing realizations. The TransAtlantic will be posting articles over the coming months on the Intelligence-IT-media complex, so it’s worth forewarning the reader of what to expect.
This might sound cryptic, but that’s because periods of realignment disturb the very coordinates that we use to orient ourselves in the political and ideological landscape to describe the changes we experience in that landscape. If we do not recognize and prepare intellectually for this situation, we will not be ready to entertain original and insightful attempts by others to sketch out the emerging configuration of interests, organizations, ideas, and institutions in the new complex of ruling class power like the intelligence-IT-media complex. For example, consider this image of the GCHQ building in Cheltenham (UK).
How can we reconcile a building that houses the British version of the NSA – an institution devoted to surveillance, state power, war infrastructure, and social control – with a pace/rainbow flag that has signified dissent and resistance to established authority and the belligerence of warmongers for so many people over so many decades? The answer lies in realignment and the difficult rearrangement of symbolic associations that it entails.
To put it at its most simple, we seem to be in a phase where the connection between labels and things (signs and signifiers) is being stretched to breaking point. Many people are feeling that their identification with left or right, with their usual political party, with their habitual choice of media outlet, or with their place in the LGBTQ acronym, are all coming under strain. Those we thought were powerless seem to exercise more power than we do, and the institutions we thought would protect us are screwing us. Those who are tasked with representing us are ignoring us, while those whom we would never have considered political allies are the only ones speaking up for us. Why are the ideologies that we have assimilated into our personal identities now being used to cast us in the social role of the villain, while more and more non-ideological (in the Weberian meaning) opponents now have our ears? The intelligence-IT-media complex has emerged in this process of realignment.
To reposition ourselves in this realignment, we will have to disengage ourselves psychologically, emotionally, intellectually from the ideological frameworks in which we have become comfortable. We have to slough off the encrustations that condition our reactions and prevent us from receiving fresh compositions that describe the world as we see it. The ways in which populations are controlled will change, and methods and means of control will be calibrated to the changing conditions of the zeitgeist. To be a critical person is therefore not to remain attached to any particular ‘content’ of a belief system or interpretive theoretical framework, but to remain faithful to an undefined mode of thinking that is at once skeptical and porous, and which is more of a disposition or an attitude toward what we are told or expected to affirm and accept than subscription to doctrines.
The most valuable contributions that critical thinkers and researchers can make in periods of realignment are therefore those that are idiosyncratic, that attempt at least to be original, that make unfamiliar but convincing connections between things, and that shake up our complacent intellectual loyalties.
The semi-retired dutch academic Kees van der Pijl is one such individual. His recent book – States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check (2022) – does precisely these things. Continuing his previous work on the historical development of the ‘Atlantic ruling class’ (2012), States of Emergency is a somewhat unnerving work that is nevertheless a product of the current conjuncture. Unsurprisingly, the focus of this work is the “Intelligence-IT-Media complex”.
Although the book ranges across a large tract of issues, the central thesis is that the ruling transnational oligarchy, centered in the North Atlantic core of the world system, seized on the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to declare a state of emergency in 2020, in order to prevent the information technology revolution and crisis conditions in global capital accumulation from fomenting a systemic democratic revolution. Sounds intense, but the salient point is that the transnational ruling class has moved on from Finance since 2008 to tech, media, and intelligence agencies. The way in which this assemblage coheres is the intelligence-IT-media complex.
Van der Pijl’s latest research works within a long tradition in sociological analysis that is always vigilant regarding the means by which the state (broadly defined) secures legitimacy, authority, and coercive force through the reproduction of war and emergency powers. He argues that the authority of the transnational ruling class has been reproduced through a ‘politics of fear’ from the end of the Cold War, through 9/11 and the War on Terror, on to the its latest iteration in global health crises (p. 17). He documents how the SARS-CoV-2 virus has provided an opportunity for governmental elites to strategize through a new ensemble of institutions, organizations, and ideas, in order to realize a surprisingly concerted program of control. As Van der Pijl summarizes,
“… a power bloc such as the triangle of the intelligence services, IT concerns and media, functions as a pivot within the ruling class that propagates a particular ideology through which power can be consolidated” (p. 87).
So what is the relation between these institutions and ideology that enables the ruling class to cohere into a power bloc? This is where we get to the difficult part, where my longwinded introduction about realignments and open minds becomes important. The answer to this question will be difficult for many, because it will not align with expectations, but we will come back to it further down.
To get to the answer, we should follow the path taken in States of Emergency, which combines in unorthodox fashion the kind of radical and dissenting critique of institutions that one would expect of a leftist academic political economist with a kind of rightist rejection of liberal metropolitan discourses that one might expect from a Fox conservative or Brexiteer. A disoriented reaction to the book would be a fair response, but it would also be an appropriate one, given the profound realignments that the current conjuncture is throwing upon us. Basically, this book is trying to retain a critical disposition toward authority and social control in a radically shifting symbolic universe of meaning. This disturbs people, and disturbed people are prone to reject what disturbs them. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.
An example. Van der Pijl draws attention to a political coalition that is being intentionally forged through the ‘intelligence-IT-media complex’, the Democratic Party, and ‘young people from minority groups’ via the MediaWise Voter Project of the Poynter Institute (p. 245), and subsidized by the Gates Foundation, Facebook, and other big-tech concerns. Looking at the COVID pandemic, Twitter files, and the 2020 US Presidential election, we can start to see this electoral coalition manifesting at the ballot box. It is this kind of political project that blurs the lines between the progressive and regressive, authoritarian and emancipatory, critical and apologist. How are we to unpack and digest this kind of coalition in the current conjuncture at a time when Fox News seems to be leading the charge against the vanguard of capitalist oligarchy, while MSNBC calls for submission to established authority and CNN acts like a railroad strike-breaker?
This ought not to be surprising, once we have detached ourselves from the associations between proper nouns, and allow ourselves to understand how no ideologem is innately critical, progressive, or enlightened in itself but relies for that designation upon the particular way in which it interacts with concrete social relations. Van der Pijl makes this clear.
… modern capitalism has reinvented itself a number of times around a power bloc, from which emanates the informal quasi-governmental program that allows the ruling class to stay on top for a certain period. Such a program, or comprehensive concept of control, combines the priority interests of the central power bloc with those of successive allies and crucially, manifests a widely shared sense that it represents the most appropriate approach to the problems of the day (p. 72).
If this is true, then ruling class power will not reinvent itself through historically compromised symbolic associations, but will adopt and integrate those that are deemed to be “the most appropriate approach to the problems of the day”. Remember the Rainbow GCHQ. At the heart of the intelligence-IT-media complex is a project to realign the power elite with the symbology of late-20th century progressivism, while all along channeling those energies into the service of authority and control. For those who are neither vigilant not perceptive, it will be easy to sleepwalk into the arms of a ruling class whistling the historical tunes of radical dissent.
It is going to be tough for those who have inherited en bloc the prevailing systems of thought from the last century without reflection or reassessment. Those people will not be able to accept how the ruling elites have assimilated political formulae that are assumed to be dissentient, but which less and less articulate the subordinated positions in society. Beholden to lingering associations, it will be easy to miss how academic, media, and party-political institutions have migrated from oppositional positions and into the hegemonic formations of big-tech capital and the security state. It will be traumatic for the ‘urban cadres’ (pp. 35,53, 285) of the metropolitan intelligentsia to realize (which means that they won’t) that they are co-opted into the habitus of an authoritarian global capitalism, irrespective of what coloring of flag they paste over their social media profile pictures.
Following on from his prior research on ruling classes, transatlantic institutions, and global elites,1 Van der Pijl has written an important book here that combines investigative journalism with political economic analysis of our governing class. The fact that an esteemed but radical university professor has published this book through a press that specializes in unwelcome messages about the establishment is telling and adds credibility to the damning analytical indictments that the book makes of our professional and literate elite. The book is audacious in a way that maybe only a retired professor can be in today’s university.
At its most empirically valuable, States of Emergency brings out the quantity of networks, organizations, and institutions of ruling class power, showing the intimate financial and social connections between mainstream media organs, security state agencies, global asset managers, pharmaceutical corporations, and the jungle of charitable foundations through which the world of soft money is laundered under the guise of philanthropy and social justice. Although structures and relations are usually of greatest interest to the sociological imagination, Van der Pijl exposes the constellation of actors in play. Naturally, some people will be tempted to malign this focus on intentional agencies with the label ‘conspiracy theory’, but that would not be a fair way to describe Van der Pijl’s research. In the time-honoured traditions of class analysis, it simply shows us how concerted ruling class power really is.
I could see how a reader might get the feeling that States of Emergency is leading them down rabbit holes into a relentless parade of conspiracies and hoaxes perpetrated upon the people, but sociologists need to recognize that there is a valid plane of investigation beyond impersonal structures, systems, and patterns. There is a role in social reality for the actions of conscious agents. Ruling classes and power elites are not just swirling and ethereal interests, but more or less coherent groups of people who do not merely share mutual interests but organize on the basis of them to achieve common objectives. There does not have to be a conspiracy when “the power of the transnational ruling class is separately applied in a concentrated fashion” (p. 22). As George Carlin once pointed out, “you don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge”.
What the book really captures is the general legitimation crisis that is being experienced between restive populations and the institutions of the establishment across the core states of the world-system and beyond. In that legitimation crisis, we will have to challenge the socio-cultural amniotic fluid that has come to surround the intelligence-IT-media complex as it draws upon the ideological resources at its disposal to patch up its sliding veneer of legitimacy.
By 2023, we are well into a new conjuncture, wherein the configurations and associations of familiar ideological, epistemic, and even party allegiances no longer align with emerging social structures. In short, many have committed in recent years to the reproduction of power and domination through complacency and an unwillingness or inability to reimagine the current conjuncture and to reassess how to intervene in it accordingly.
What is one then to do? When things that we have been committed to no longer seem to make sense, when organizations we have trusted no longer seem to have our backs, and when political templates no longer fit enough of what we experience to appear true, that is what it is like to live in a political and ideological realignment. In such circumstances, it is essential to cast around for those who are observing, analyzing, and expressing the realignment in a way that you recognize, but who also stand out from the crowd of oblivious conformists who have neither the courage nor the imagination to renegotiate their relationship to the symbolic universe that has oriented them until this moment. Where can we go to begin our renegotiation? If a little unnerving for the erstwhile leftist, Kees van der Pijl’s States of Emergency is nevertheless a good place to start.
Endnotes
Kees van der Pijl, The Making of the Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 2012).
It's a little long, but well written and a good read. I have to admit that I reached for the dictionary once or twice. I did order the book by the way
The foundational principle of the capitalist economic system adhered to across the world is the monopoly of money issuance by the private banking system, accepted by most economists as the necessary means of providing the means (like a mini-cog in a larger cog) to facilitate further extension of economic activity ie. for further spending/consumption and capital investment by business, ‘multiplying’ the effect of economic activity by extending out the proceeds of the economic wealth by leveraging capital as debt (via fractional reserve) for further credit (interest rate policy keeps in check the expansionism if the economy overheats or the monetary expansion itself creates inflation). However, despite “reserve ratios”, the process leads to a loan-spiral (however the past 4 decades, trends in the banking system worldwide have seen reserve ratios on bank deposits increasingly set at arbitrary levels over time to ease the freedom of international finance capital). The loan-spiral process leads to the tendency of capital over-extending itself in any boom period, as debt expands until such a point that economic activity, which the debt repayment is reliant upon, can’t keep up with the extent of return-on-investments needed (debt repayments), causing a pinprick in the economic bubble. This is the explanation for the very nature of the business cycle, boom then bust. Capitalism cannot sustain itself without people and whole nations going into debt. Growth of international finance for domestic wealth generation has created a constant pressure for ‘yield’ (to the extent that dodgy financial instruments were used as collateral for further lending leading to the 2008 financial crash). Infact, asset-price gains have been financed by a debt-leveraged inflation of real estate, stock and bond prices. The extent of the ‘concentration’ of the money creation process within the private-banking system may be questioned (ie. why can’t a nation’s central bank issue a higher % of money, by restricting the private banking system’s money issuance by increasing reserve ratios?)