Conspiracism, Nationalism, Decline

Sarah Brouillette reviews Jamie Merchant’s “Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline.”

By Sarah BrouilletteJune 19, 2025

• Politics

• Economics and Finance

JAMIE MERCHANT’S Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline came out last year, but considering recent news headlines—“Trump’s Tariffs Creating ‘Tensions’ Among G7 Ahead of Summit”; “China Warns US over Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’”; “US Officials Deport Asian Migrants to South Sudan Despite Court Order”—it’s extraordinarily timely. Its relevance seems to expand by the day.

Merchant is a writer and radical based in Chicago. He has published widely, but this particular book began in the Field Notes section of The Brooklyn Rail, edited by Paul Mattick—at present, the most highly regarded outlet for new communist thought. Merchant’s articles have distinguished him as one of the sharpest analysts of how the US government, in particular its central bankers, have been attempting to manage global economic decline. If I understand modern monetary theory at all, it is because I read Merchant’s account of it, where he positions the permissive disposition toward deficit spending as one among a series of failing attempts “to stay the terminal decline of American capitalism.” Endgame assembles some of his earlier work, situates his observations within a broader history, and doubles down on the inexorability of it all. The result looks with striking clarity at the unholy trinity of “declining labor productivity, political paralysis, and social disintegration”—a “spiralling downward pattern” or “doom loop” of mutually reinforcing horrors that defines no small part of our contemporary condition.

It is also a self-described “epitaph” marking the closure of an entire era of world history. We start in the postwar period, when nations were being stitched into an integrated global capitalist system with relatively open trade and free markets. In its broad contours, this part of the story is likely familiar. The global economy was dynamic and productive enough, and conducive to a standard of living that pacified enough people, that one could speak of a stable liberal political “order” and generalized “class compact” in the developed economies. The richest nations also boasted foreign policy regimes that sought further integration of emerging markets under the banner of “development.” The resulting boom period was intense, but ultimately short-lived. What emerged from the downturn that followed was the neoliberal era, defined by measures to confine government spending to whatever would aid in profit-making, just as wage gains were clawed back, work was casualized, and industrial production moved overseas in pursuit of cheaper labor. Integration into the capitalist world economy meant that, around the world, more people, including more women, were now reliant on their wages to pay for what they needed to survive; at the same time, jobs, if you could find them, offered witheringly little.

We arrive, then, at our present moment. This is Merchant’s real topic: a slowing world economy that replaces the integrated globalized world market with a gladiatorial fight to the death over whatever profits can still be derived from growth. The real problem is secular stagnation in the rate of growth across the whole world, but the global capitalist political class can hardly be expected to blame the system that makes them so fucking rich. To be sure, some of them do realize that there is a benefit in acknowledging that people are suffering. They need to pretend to identify causes and they need to look as though they are offering solutions. Hence an ever-evolving range of technological fixes, desperate monetarist ploys, and hypernationalist policies and dog whistles, all of which only temporarily offset crises while ultimately making them worse.

As readers of Marx know well, increasing productivity by using technology to replace workers or to speed up their work can lead to short-term gains, but in the end it only reduces profitability more. Corporations competing for profits will introduce technological innovations, but this means “ever fewer labor inputs are needed to produce the same amount of output”; as a result, “the overall demand for labor relative to output decreases.” Merchant describes this as “deleting humans”—a phrase that nicely captures the propulsive computational drive toward technologized efficiencies in production. One cannot locate anywhere, now, the kind of workforce that characterized the United States in the 1950s or Britain in the 1890s, as fewer workers are needed to achieve higher rates of productivity. Who, then, will buy all the commodities that need to be produced and sold for value to continue to accrue? The unemployed?

This is a global reality. In the words of the Chuǎng collective, whose work is focused on capitalism in China, “the percentage of the population required to produce a given quantity of goods and extract a given quantity of natural resources diminishes over time,” such that “it becomes difficult to reproduce proletarians as productive workers.” Land is developed, resources extracted, but workers are only fitfully employed in short-term arrangements that fail to provide them with much material benefit, motivation, or futurity. Chuǎng writes that the “traditional characteristics associated with the surplus population (informality, precarity, illegality) have again become relatively ‘normal’ characteristics of the laboring population as a whole.” This means accumulation of wealth for a few, without significant growth in formal employment, and without sustained or prolonged social development in the form of state distribution of taxes for social services and infrastructures. Most people forced to move away from relatively rural economies where subsistence is possible have not been finding secure jobs with high wages. They rely on informal work and fitful entrepreneurship instead, accepting pay that isn’t regulated by legal minimums, while enduring forms of work discipline—responsibilities to family, the sheer need to survive—that cannot be escaped nor, it seems, fought against through labor agitation.

Meanwhile, as people-deleting labor markets expand—the communist theorist Joshua Clover would call these “non-absorptive”—governments are busy pursuing hypernationalist policies, such as trade restrictions and tariffs, that disavow their own former integrated globalism. The economy is managed as a “zero-sum affair” in which “growth for some can only come at the expense of others,” Merchant writes. Those in power prop up the legitimacy of these policies by fostering a broader “recrudescence of ethnicist and nationalist mass movements” that celebrate putting the national community first. We saw this recently where I live, in Canada, when Trump’s zany tariff regime had Canadian politicians promising a “Canada first” response. CBC radio encouraged people to “buy Canadian”; stores took US products off the shelves, leaving swaths of empty space for emphasis.

At the same time, states have been playing around with monetary mechanisms, in a process that Merchant describes as the financialization of government and the governmentalization of finance. Here the United States is key, since the dollar is so foundational as the reserve currency backing global exchange. The people who develop US economic policy are there to preserve the value of assets priced in the dollar. Merchant shows that the US government has no choice but to be committed to maintaining “a life support apparatus for the private, market-based system on which the survival and political legitimacy of the U.S. state itself depends.” Debt continues to grow, as tax breaks are granted to corporations and wealthy asset holders, and disbursements are made to private banks and corporations on the foolish assumption that profitability will eventually return. Extreme wealth still accrues, while wages dramatically fail to keep pace with rising costs of living. A viral tweet from a couple years ago captures the result well enough.

Let’s add to this picture. Instead of a welfare state, Merchant argues, it is policing and mass imprisonment that are “the de facto policies by which the United States manages its surplus population.” These are property-less people “consigned to joblessness, underemployment, and deprivation—essentially to economic non-existence.” They pose a threat to private property, and policing is how this threat is managed. It’s all very expensive. After policing and imprisonment, and self-serving militarism abroad (including most recently backing Israel’s genocide in Palestine), the US state uses whatever resources remain available to service the credit system. The inevitable result is that, as Merchant writes, “there will be ever less social wealth available to provide the basic resources that society needs to materially reproduce itself.” No wonder people are so despairing.

In attending to this despair, Merchant’s book seems to contain the seeds of another (or so one hopes), as it traces the morbid social symptoms that the doom loop generates, from conspiracism to transphobia to the return to “traditional family” rhetoric. Endgame opens with an account of a mass shooting event, and an effort to understand why people like Payton Gendron have become convinced that a shadowy cabal of global elites are destroying “our” communities, making everything terrible, and ultimately trying to wipe out the white race. Conspiracism, Merchant argues, is an effort “to reconcile certain contradictory facts, like crushing inequality in what is supposed to be the world’s premier democracy, or declining living standards in the richest country in history.”

This approach differs from the line that is perhaps more familiar to cultural theorists, in which the recourse to paranoid conspiracy is something like an effort “to think a system so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves,” as Fredric Jameson put it. Novelists like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon have used conspiracy theory as a way to capture a common feeling of being adrift and mystified in the face of information overload and an abstraction of social relations that is (ostensibly) intensified by financialization.

By contrast, Merchant grounds conspiracism, quite simply and powerfully, in lies people are hectored into telling themselves about their sheer lack of money and opportunities. What appear to be mass psychoses are the result of orchestrated campaigns designed to make people misrecognize the real sources of their miseries. It’s China decimating US industry through immoral trade practices. It’s immigrants taking what is rightfully yours. It’s people who don’t conform to traditional gender identities, who don’t want to be part of traditional families, who are undermining the national project by failing to be the right level of masculine or feminine. In essence, right-wing conspiracists blame scheming outsiders for their own roles in worsening the conditions of life’s “general unaffordability.”

In a recent interview with John Clegg, Merchant stated, provocatively, that new gender orientations are “really the thing that they’re the most terrified of right now.” Clegg points out that the right associates a strong family with the vanished era of solid economic growth, “when gender roles were clear, and men in particular had a sense of their responsibilities and privileges.” Their stance is that gender is natural and immutable, and that economic decline manifests, in part, a perversion of its essence. Scholars such as Gabriel Winant and M. E. O’Brien have argued, however, that formerly sedimented gender expectations—which are inherently mutable—have been loosened in unique ways in recent years because jobs are no longer stable and lifelong, and because of the displacement of the old dual model of housewife and breadwinner. There has been a “breakdown in intergenerational transmission of gender norms,” as Winant puts it. In this context, the pronatalism of figures like Elon Musk and J. D. Vance is designed to convince people that the nation’s prosperous future, which is tied tightly to a return to the traditional family, is still on the horizon. They don’t need to murder their healthcare CEOs or fight their bosses. They merely need to commit themselves to the household duty of reproducing American citizens for the national project.

This revitalized rhetoric of the traditional family is grounded in a profound avoidance of history: the downward spiral of the capitalist economy, the comically anachronistic production of a labor force, and the immiseration and war that are driving people to cross borders looking for better lives. As Merchant makes so startlingly clear, there will be a tipping point, a reckoning, a break, an ultimate end, and it may not be that far off. To look these realities in the face can seem intolerable. Right-wing conspiracism invites people to look instead at a fantasy world in which the old family values are available as a viable path to national economic prosperity that is still within reach if its opponents—feminists, the “woke,” racialized outsiders, and infiltrators—can only be defeated.

But the outsiders have their own protagonism, and Merchant, who is himself active in Chicago’s more radical circles, ends with this—the insurrectionary movements that emerge as, in the eloquent words of Joshua Clover, “those surplus to the needs of capital and empire grow, and grow restless.” They are responding to pervasive political alienation and marginality, to being forced to scrape together some kind of decent life in profoundly hostile conditions that are controlled by people actively standing in the way of the creation of anything genuinely new. There appears to be no new politics, no futurity, but instead a threatening planetary nonfuturity: this is the context for what Clover describes as “surplus rebellions,” the resurgence of urban riots by “the planetary classes dangereuses.” They are brought together by their shared immiseration and forced relation to state violence.

Merchant describes the resulting insurrectionary flare-ups as moments of the “multitude” assuming “combat footing”—in global waves of uprisings in Minneapolis, Lagos, São Paolo, Guangzhou, and Los Angeles today—over university tuition, transit costs, rising rents, police violence, working conditions, ICE raids, and more. These movements reach well beyond the workplace, into stores and urban streets and squares, where “new possibilities for class formation will emerge through the disintegration of laboring life as we know it.” Jasper Bernes describes this as “mass struggle [that] is now eccentric to production, both inside and out of it.” We are seeing how it reaches even into naturalized gendered bodily comportment and the structure of the traditional family. Nothing lasts forever. Everything will be, in Merchant’s phrase, “engulfed by the rising torrent.” It’s only a matter of time. Will we sink, or hold each other aloft?