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Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline
A new account of globalization’s decline as the natural outworking of market economics.
Globalization as we know it is over. Industrial policies dismissed as obsolete for decades have been embraced by governments worldwide, geopolitical tensions are rising higher and higher, and resurgent far-right movements are threatening the foundations of contemporary democracies. In this book, Jamie Merchant traces the roots of this decline beyond the oft-blamed failures of the post-Cold War era. Instead, Merchant argues that the great political and economic changes of the last decade are due not to globalization but to the long-term decay of the market-based economic order. By historicizing this period of globalization and decline, Endgame illuminates a path forward for both the global economy and international politics.
Globalization as we know it is over. Industrial policies dismissed as obsolete for decades have been embraced by governments worldwide, geopolitical tensions are rising higher and higher, and resurgent far-right movements are threatening the foundations of contemporary democracies. In this book, Jamie Merchant traces the roots of this decline beyond the oft-blamed failures of the post-Cold War era. Instead, Merchant argues that the great political and economic changes of the last decade are due not to globalization but to the long-term decay of the market-based economic order. By historicizing this period of globalization and decline, Endgame illuminates a path forward for both the global economy and international politics.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published September 20, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 5, 2025
exposición extremadamente clara y sintética de la situación económica, política y social del momento actual a nivel mundial. en resumen, cagamos (pero no sólo nosotros).
por otra parte, alguien debería darles un tirón de orejas a las ediciones extáticas porque a veces se nota que la traducción podría haber estado bastante más cuidada.
por otra parte, alguien debería darles un tirón de orejas a las ediciones extáticas porque a veces se nota que la traducción podría haber estado bastante más cuidada.
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December 14, 20244.5 really
Such a great distillation of the economic dynamics underlying our post-globalization moment.
Such a great distillation of the economic dynamics underlying our post-globalization moment.
March 4, 2025
Brilliant and concise analysis of our current conjuncture. Highly recommended
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November 12, 2024A nice follow on from the rest of the BR series, working out Smith and Neel's texts in to the current moment (even if Merchant began it in 2019!) and somewhat more ambitious on political strategy (laying a composition-inflected framework even if at an expected level of abstraction). A bit more critical political economy 101 than I was expecting, but does so swiftly and sharply.
October 31, 2024
An essential analysis of global political economy, helping us reassess left strategy in the wake of the failure of Sanders and other similar electoral campaigns. Merchant takes Marx's value analysis and applies it to the current state of global finance, arguing that arcane financial technologies such as derivatives are still very much based in the exploitation of labor. As intense global competition pushes capitalists to invest in technologies that are less-reliant on human labor (such as AI, etc.) it becomes more and more difficult to continue to produce more profit. Due to this failure, governments are becoming increasingly nationalistic and engaging in zero-sum competitions over existing resources to keep their domestic economy afloat. This, however, is not a coherent response to a global crisis, and can only intensify those crisis tendencies. This forms the situation that any left response must fully comprehend before it can mount a response. Merchant weaves in subtle analyses of cultural phenomena emanating from our incoherent, crisis-ridden moment, greatly enriching the political-economic analysis. A book that must be read and debated in this seemingly rudderless moment for the left.
March 1, 2025
“The ideological hegemony of nationalist discourse today is rooted in the inability of the private capitalist economy to overcome the barriers to its own growth, and the resulting imperative for national governments to reassert state power in an attempt to resuscitate it.” Merchant’s readable and sharp book presents a very international analysis of the world system of capitalism with its global circuits of production and distribution to demonstrate the crisis of 2007-2008 has effectively put an end to globalization and neoliberalism and the rise of nationalisms both left and right are the result of trying to keep the system on life support. In this his critique is explanatory of the rise of the far right and critical of left populism as both are tied to a kind of economic nationalism that is the result of, and driving the intense social, economic, and political crisis—these nationalisms are the symptom of crisis, not the solution. Thought provoking book.
June 5, 2025
Books on topical issues have a tendency to be quickly rendered obsolete by the topics themselves. Endgame certainly isn't one of those, and in fact although written last year has become more relevant given the events of April, where it is almost as if the tagline of the book “Economic Nationalism and Global Decline” were itself being brandished on Trump’s comically sized placards announcing his aleatory tariff rates on the entire world.
The book is short yet deep. The six chapters deal respectively with, the theory and history of international trade and globalisation and its double of developmentalism, the “populist” surge of the last decade or so, the rebirth of industrial strategy with the IRA and such as well as an able introduction to marxist value theory, the political theory of money, the international monetary system and its role in the disciplining of labour, and finally a chapter on the potentials of class struggle looking forward. If you needed a short introduction to the current political situation from a (fundamentalist) marxist perspective, you would be hard pressed to find a more lucid or penetrating one.
What is/was globalisation? It was principally the official ideology of the system itself. That by removing restrictions to trade, which would allow countries to specialise in producing what they are most productive in, total output and therefore global welfare would increase. “Global welfare” measured as output or GDP certainly has grown continuously in the post war period as states have generally lowered tariffs. The reality for ordinary people however, whether they are proletarianised ex-peasants in the periphery of capitalism or workers in the capitalist core who are threatened by deindustrialisation and growing structural unemployment, did not match with the image of their society that was being displayed to them by the “liberal elite”. Into this vacuum of truth then slipped the counter narratives of the nationalist right that the poverty of the working classes was caused by foreigners, drawing no distinction between working class immigrants and foreign ruling classes. The liberal elite themselves were searching for answers too as stagnant growth from the financial crash of 2008 was causing them worry. In this way the aims of rightwing populists and liberal elites converged in increasingly autocratic, protectionist and bellicose directions. The sabre rattling against China is a bi-partisan affair.
The IRA, which on the stage of politics was presented as a socialistic intervention in the economy to develop green energy, actually involved billions of fossil fuel subsidies and has “brought back” almost no jobs. Its aims were national security ones, diversifying the energy mix of the US and trying to catch up with China in the chips and AI arms races. It is a clear example of the sharpening imperialist tensions.
The author takes the precarious situation of the American empire as a launching point to consider two highly influential explanations of American power and its effects in the world. First he considers Michael Hudson’s theory of superimperialism, where countries are forced into taking on the deluge of American debt by threats of invasion and financial sanctions. This is a straightforward political explanation that effectively relegates economics to the background. On the other hand there is the work by Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein, ‘Trade Wars are Class Wars’ which could be said to suffer from a similar problem despite coming to opposite conclusions. It posits that saving gluts in manufacturing countries like China and Germany due to the restricted consumption of the middle classes (caused by undervaluing of the currency) fund excess spending in debtor countries like the USA. This exacerbates inequality in both sets of countries as demand in the exporting countries is kept low and financial profits in the importing countries is kept high. In this account the USA is essentially the victim of the selfish trade policies of China and Germany. Why do German and Chinese elites hoard wealth yet Americans don’t? Who knows. Unsurprisingly this framing has become very popular with the Trumpists who have used it to advocate for their protectionist policies. The problem with both theories, according to the author, is that they have a nationalist view of the world economy, viewing imperialism as particular nations exploiting other nations. They also view states as something separate from the economy. Whereas the author sees the world economy as a planetary factory split by class divisions of workers and capitalists that cross national borders and are both political and economic relations at the same time.
These relations are often contradictory. It is in the interest of capitalists to reduce the amount paid to labour in order to increase profits, but if the wages paid to labour are too low then the working class will struggle to reproduce itself thus threatening the source of profits, as capitalists found out during the 19th century. A solution to this contradiction was found by investing in heavy industry that can reduce the cost of producing consumer goods, thus reducing the relative size of the wage fund to total profits without reducing the quality of living of workers. The problem is that the increasing proportion of total capital made up of constant capital such as machinery, robotics and computers mean that the rate of profit falls. To rescue themselves from this fall capitalists have to invest in further productivity increasing technology, which inevitably causes a further fall. The overproduction of capital relative to the system’s ability to absorb it causes diminishing returns to the strategy of industrialisation led growth. Money goes instead into the financial sector where better profit rates can be had extracting wealth from productive activities and the wage fund through monopolisation and asset inflation. This is not only the actions of some opportunistic hucksters but the official policy of governments and central banks worldwide. The massive expansion of credit following the energy shock of the early 70s and then the disciplining of it through the volcker shock of the late 70s have both made possible the globalisation of value chains that has defanged organised labour in the capitalist core and allowed wage stagnation since then. This gave some life back to the system but even that has stalled since the financial crash of 2008. The policy of globalisation is no longer working and the policy of financialisation is hanging by a thread. Even that is struggling to capture enough wealth. The return of inflation indicates that central banks can no longer control the steady appreciation of financial assets. The ruling classes of different countries are forced to resort to capturing wealth through protectionism, the most aggressive and confrontational form of economic policy before outright war.
Here then is a better explanation of why things are getting worse than blaming the greed and/or insanity of our leaders or the leaders of other countries. Our system is in terminal decline. Populists and elites are scrambling to take as much as they can of what’s left. And as of yet, nothing is capable of replacing it. The author places his hope in the working class considered broadly, that is not just those in employment but also those who are part of the surplus population unable to find a job and all those whose labour goes into reproducing the class itself. Against the deprivations that are coming, this class will have to fight. Hopefully we.will win.
The book is short yet deep. The six chapters deal respectively with, the theory and history of international trade and globalisation and its double of developmentalism, the “populist” surge of the last decade or so, the rebirth of industrial strategy with the IRA and such as well as an able introduction to marxist value theory, the political theory of money, the international monetary system and its role in the disciplining of labour, and finally a chapter on the potentials of class struggle looking forward. If you needed a short introduction to the current political situation from a (fundamentalist) marxist perspective, you would be hard pressed to find a more lucid or penetrating one.
What is/was globalisation? It was principally the official ideology of the system itself. That by removing restrictions to trade, which would allow countries to specialise in producing what they are most productive in, total output and therefore global welfare would increase. “Global welfare” measured as output or GDP certainly has grown continuously in the post war period as states have generally lowered tariffs. The reality for ordinary people however, whether they are proletarianised ex-peasants in the periphery of capitalism or workers in the capitalist core who are threatened by deindustrialisation and growing structural unemployment, did not match with the image of their society that was being displayed to them by the “liberal elite”. Into this vacuum of truth then slipped the counter narratives of the nationalist right that the poverty of the working classes was caused by foreigners, drawing no distinction between working class immigrants and foreign ruling classes. The liberal elite themselves were searching for answers too as stagnant growth from the financial crash of 2008 was causing them worry. In this way the aims of rightwing populists and liberal elites converged in increasingly autocratic, protectionist and bellicose directions. The sabre rattling against China is a bi-partisan affair.
The IRA, which on the stage of politics was presented as a socialistic intervention in the economy to develop green energy, actually involved billions of fossil fuel subsidies and has “brought back” almost no jobs. Its aims were national security ones, diversifying the energy mix of the US and trying to catch up with China in the chips and AI arms races. It is a clear example of the sharpening imperialist tensions.
The author takes the precarious situation of the American empire as a launching point to consider two highly influential explanations of American power and its effects in the world. First he considers Michael Hudson’s theory of superimperialism, where countries are forced into taking on the deluge of American debt by threats of invasion and financial sanctions. This is a straightforward political explanation that effectively relegates economics to the background. On the other hand there is the work by Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein, ‘Trade Wars are Class Wars’ which could be said to suffer from a similar problem despite coming to opposite conclusions. It posits that saving gluts in manufacturing countries like China and Germany due to the restricted consumption of the middle classes (caused by undervaluing of the currency) fund excess spending in debtor countries like the USA. This exacerbates inequality in both sets of countries as demand in the exporting countries is kept low and financial profits in the importing countries is kept high. In this account the USA is essentially the victim of the selfish trade policies of China and Germany. Why do German and Chinese elites hoard wealth yet Americans don’t? Who knows. Unsurprisingly this framing has become very popular with the Trumpists who have used it to advocate for their protectionist policies. The problem with both theories, according to the author, is that they have a nationalist view of the world economy, viewing imperialism as particular nations exploiting other nations. They also view states as something separate from the economy. Whereas the author sees the world economy as a planetary factory split by class divisions of workers and capitalists that cross national borders and are both political and economic relations at the same time.
These relations are often contradictory. It is in the interest of capitalists to reduce the amount paid to labour in order to increase profits, but if the wages paid to labour are too low then the working class will struggle to reproduce itself thus threatening the source of profits, as capitalists found out during the 19th century. A solution to this contradiction was found by investing in heavy industry that can reduce the cost of producing consumer goods, thus reducing the relative size of the wage fund to total profits without reducing the quality of living of workers. The problem is that the increasing proportion of total capital made up of constant capital such as machinery, robotics and computers mean that the rate of profit falls. To rescue themselves from this fall capitalists have to invest in further productivity increasing technology, which inevitably causes a further fall. The overproduction of capital relative to the system’s ability to absorb it causes diminishing returns to the strategy of industrialisation led growth. Money goes instead into the financial sector where better profit rates can be had extracting wealth from productive activities and the wage fund through monopolisation and asset inflation. This is not only the actions of some opportunistic hucksters but the official policy of governments and central banks worldwide. The massive expansion of credit following the energy shock of the early 70s and then the disciplining of it through the volcker shock of the late 70s have both made possible the globalisation of value chains that has defanged organised labour in the capitalist core and allowed wage stagnation since then. This gave some life back to the system but even that has stalled since the financial crash of 2008. The policy of globalisation is no longer working and the policy of financialisation is hanging by a thread. Even that is struggling to capture enough wealth. The return of inflation indicates that central banks can no longer control the steady appreciation of financial assets. The ruling classes of different countries are forced to resort to capturing wealth through protectionism, the most aggressive and confrontational form of economic policy before outright war.
Here then is a better explanation of why things are getting worse than blaming the greed and/or insanity of our leaders or the leaders of other countries. Our system is in terminal decline. Populists and elites are scrambling to take as much as they can of what’s left. And as of yet, nothing is capable of replacing it. The author places his hope in the working class considered broadly, that is not just those in employment but also those who are part of the surplus population unable to find a job and all those whose labour goes into reproducing the class itself. Against the deprivations that are coming, this class will have to fight. Hopefully we.will win.
December 21, 2024
This book is a really good left Marxist approach to the global political crisis of the 21st century. Jamie Merchant's central argument, presented in plain English, gracefully bereft of Marxist and economics terms of art, is that capital's expanded reproduction process more or less exhausted itself in the 70s, and its effort to juice itself through financialization created crisis in 08 and now manifests as a global, secular, slow down. Merchant, in other words, takes seriously the Marx of Capital volume three, for whom the rate of profit really does tend to fall, and Merchant believes, quite seriously, that our current political crisis is produced by a world capitalist order characterized by declining profit rates. That has led business and political actors alike to treat economic growth as a zero-sum competition; and that has led to resurgent nationalism. No one state can 'fix' capitalism: the problem is the playing out of a dynamic internal to capital -- again, Marx's story about the rate of profit to fall -- and so what we are left with is a death spiral towards global war.
Merchant's story is a great thumbnail sketch of our crisis. He equivocates in a few places: the reading of Marx's rate of profit to fall vacillates between a story about working class consumption, where the crisis is driven by workers being cast out of the production process leading to underconsumption, and a more metaphysical story about the classical volume three story about a certain ratio between constant and variable capital leading simply to lower and lower profit rates. I'm not sure either story is entirely persuasive as a narrative about what has happened to capital reproduction since stagflation, but I do think that Merchant is correct that *something* in the way capital reproduces itself changed dramatically in the 70s, in a way that resembles secular stagnation, and that *this* multinational, global dynamic is the main driver of political dysfunction in the West, from Reagan to Clinton to Trump. It is not a contingency of history, in other words, that Clinton, Obama, and now Biden, were unable to revive the good ol' days of New Deal politics and working class liberalism. The structure of the global economy, and the role of the US within it, has moved on.
The crisis we live with, then, can't be defeated by clever populist slogans, the quick seizure of the commanding heights of US politics. Something much more destructive and creative is required. Merchant's politics accordingly tend to the ultra-left: he sees more promise in BLM riots as class politics than in Sandersism. This is all OK as far as it goes, but you do have to squint to really think that what was at stake in June 2020 was workers and bosses per se; it also imputes a great deal of spontaneously good energy to the oppressed in the US, and enlarges the category of the 'oppressed' in the US to include the most painfully and acutely immiserated unhoused along with computer programmers and academic adjuncts.
I'm not sure that's realistic. But then again, I have no solution either. So....
Merchant's story is a great thumbnail sketch of our crisis. He equivocates in a few places: the reading of Marx's rate of profit to fall vacillates between a story about working class consumption, where the crisis is driven by workers being cast out of the production process leading to underconsumption, and a more metaphysical story about the classical volume three story about a certain ratio between constant and variable capital leading simply to lower and lower profit rates. I'm not sure either story is entirely persuasive as a narrative about what has happened to capital reproduction since stagflation, but I do think that Merchant is correct that *something* in the way capital reproduces itself changed dramatically in the 70s, in a way that resembles secular stagnation, and that *this* multinational, global dynamic is the main driver of political dysfunction in the West, from Reagan to Clinton to Trump. It is not a contingency of history, in other words, that Clinton, Obama, and now Biden, were unable to revive the good ol' days of New Deal politics and working class liberalism. The structure of the global economy, and the role of the US within it, has moved on.
The crisis we live with, then, can't be defeated by clever populist slogans, the quick seizure of the commanding heights of US politics. Something much more destructive and creative is required. Merchant's politics accordingly tend to the ultra-left: he sees more promise in BLM riots as class politics than in Sandersism. This is all OK as far as it goes, but you do have to squint to really think that what was at stake in June 2020 was workers and bosses per se; it also imputes a great deal of spontaneously good energy to the oppressed in the US, and enlarges the category of the 'oppressed' in the US to include the most painfully and acutely immiserated unhoused along with computer programmers and academic adjuncts.
I'm not sure that's realistic. But then again, I have no solution either. So....
December 16, 2024
This narrative has always been missing in the mainstream leftist discourse for me. Most people don’t understand how financial markets work and therefore tend to miss the global aspect of the class struggle which obviously wasn’t so important in the more classical Marxist theory of capital. The explanation of how asset trade allows western corporations to skim profits off of the surplus value produced by the global (primarily Asian today) underclass is especially eye opening. This, combined with the reserve currency status of the dollar, makes the centralization of the control over financial markets in the hands of the patron state necessary for the reproduction of the material conditions of capitalism in an era of declining rates of profit. In this light, even Biden-esque policies directed at ending the neoliberal order are seen as a natural effort to stave off the crunch of falling profits by integrating strategically important industries into the state itself. This willful undermining of its own free market ideology by the ruling class is a contradiction that is explained by the contradiction given by reproduction of labor inherent in capitalism itself (capitalism needs the working class and strives to reduce the costs of labor to increase profits, but has to balance this against popular discontent).
Very very good. Quite repetitive because I suspect the author was writing for an audience unfamiliar with classical Marxist theory (which I represent), but the repetition came off as effective nonetheless.
Very very good. Quite repetitive because I suspect the author was writing for an audience unfamiliar with classical Marxist theory (which I represent), but the repetition came off as effective nonetheless.
November 21, 2024
A rather unorthodox mix of value-critical crisis and collapse theory (Kurz, Postone) and classic Marxist class struggle rhetoric. This is interesting because the subject-hostile stance of value critique (the subject, and thus also its class position, is entirely shaped by the value relation) and the subjective element of the class position (the subject remains, despite everything, the driving force of change) converge here in a state of crisis-induced collapse. While for Postone the crisis (or the intensifying inner contradiction between value and wealth, the “treadmill effect,” which Merchant also references here without marking it as a quotation) is merely understood as the “condition of possibility” for a critique of capitalism, Merchant is already rhapsodizing about uprisings, mass protests, and revolutions in the context of global collapse. Not incorrect in its analysis, but I am not sure I would draw the same conclusions. Nonetheless, the book offers a comparatively accessible and comprehensive introduction to Marxist crisis theory (leaving aside the financial capitalism hocus-pocus, which I barely understood).
May 4, 2025
It makes a decent case elaborating why capitalism in flux rather than experiencing a hard break despite neomercantilist strategies and economic nationalisms emerging. Then highlights some of the terrain we exist on now, rate of profit falling, the ruling class needing to suppress wages, critical production in the industrial periphery, and so on. It critiques MMT, populism, the idea of a neutral state, and so on. The final chapter does something interesting and calls for analysis and engagement on three fronts of class struggle the Image, the Shop, and the streets. Basically saying to not abandon interpellation to populism or the capitalist recuperated left and to update our analysis based on the actual unfolding terrain and conditions.
People who know more about anti capitalist econ than me are saying there’s a lot of unsound things in here even if some statements are generally correct and it relies on some Ricardan positions regarding unproductive finance and just gets a lot of the specifics about the China stuff wrong.
Worth a read esp alongside Melinda Cooper. I think I’ll try to read Disaster Nationalism too and see how they compare.
People who know more about anti capitalist econ than me are saying there’s a lot of unsound things in here even if some statements are generally correct and it relies on some Ricardan positions regarding unproductive finance and just gets a lot of the specifics about the China stuff wrong.
Worth a read esp alongside Melinda Cooper. I think I’ll try to read Disaster Nationalism too and see how they compare.
November 28, 2025
I was barely able to crawl my way through this not-so-creatively presented Marxist screed that is decidedly heavy on thesaurus usage, unnecessarily purple prose, and anecdotes and specious and undocumented assertions; and noticeably light on writing and intellectual rigor, and any semblance of balance. It first presents as an interesting idea and read, and then, while you wade through the kind of writing you did on your college philosophy mid-term paper, slowly becomes more polemic, disingenuous and at times shambolic. You’d be better off reading Marx himself and the New York Times.
All that said, the idea here is ambitious. And the author is clearly not dumb. I’d recommend less certainty and more curiosity for his book number next. And please spend more time refining the writing. You earn points for clarity and precision; not for sentence length and extraordinary vocabulary.
All that said, the idea here is ambitious. And the author is clearly not dumb. I’d recommend less certainty and more curiosity for his book number next. And please spend more time refining the writing. You earn points for clarity and precision; not for sentence length and extraordinary vocabulary.
January 14, 2025
Weird that they didn't really wrap up the infinity stones storyline but was a passable explanation of contemporary economic nationalism in the context of global crisis.
Absolutely fell off its wheels at the end though, where it's bombastic attempt at charting a counter-power felt undeveloped and rushed. Jumpscared by an outright dismissal of the politics of national liberation which was decidedly sus. Plus making basic incorrect statements about Gramsci and hegemony (we have all done it, just some of us not in a published book).
Absolutely fell off its wheels at the end though, where it's bombastic attempt at charting a counter-power felt undeveloped and rushed. Jumpscared by an outright dismissal of the politics of national liberation which was decidedly sus. Plus making basic incorrect statements about Gramsci and hegemony (we have all done it, just some of us not in a published book).
November 16, 2025
Probably the best analysis I've read on 2020s American and world political economy.
However, I don't think Merchant here really offers a comprehensive solution to the fundamental problems he so expertly illustrates. Class consciousness is all well and good, but in terms of policy it's unclear what he means by that.
Still a great read. Highly recommend.
However, I don't think Merchant here really offers a comprehensive solution to the fundamental problems he so expertly illustrates. Class consciousness is all well and good, but in terms of policy it's unclear what he means by that.
Still a great read. Highly recommend.
December 8, 2025
Comença fluixet, amb una descripció de la geopolitica mundial que (tot i pertinent) ja està desactualitzada; però acabant sent una exposició magnífica de teoria marxista aplicada a la situació de estancament secular. Durant els pròxims dies el revisaré per fer notes i potser li pujo a 5/5.
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