Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
One could easily speak of a Gramsci Midcult these days. Metapolitics is the buzzword with which all sorts of political factions ride into battle, promising to win cultural ground – of whatever kind. The vulgar Gramscian responds to the cultural blind spots of the establishment with a political blind spot of his own: he loves cultural abstraction in order to blank out political concreteness.
That the two, cultural vibes and political program, are connected is shown by the success of the Abundance movement in the United States. Here, refreshingly, we have a movement that has managed to postulate a Vibeshift that does not peter out in the nihilistic hyperpolitics of the culture war but implies a specific political program. The new appetite for the future, hidden in the promise of excess, is at once the confidence that it can be reached through a few political reforms. For good reasons much has been and is being said about Abundance, yet the deeper question remains unanswered: how could the movement arise at all, and how did it prevail among political elites? Does a new culture of growth, as the economic historian Joel Mokyr once described it, find its starting point with Ezra Klein and Thompson, or at some other moment? Can a “culture of growth” be written into being, or are exogenous conditions decisive?
A first sign against the starting-point thesis is the Nobel Prize itself, which Mokyr was to receive in 2025 for his book A Culture Of Growth. That Nobel Prizes ought to be awarded by quality changes nothing about the fact that their award signals shifts in global content. A new interest in growth had already been hinted at a year earlier, with the Nobel Prize for Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. The institutional framework of growth, expressed for a popular audience in Why Nations Fail, was rounded out a year later by its cultural component. Good framework conditions, stable and adaptable institutions, would not suffice – cultural preconditions were needed as well. Mokyr argued that sustained technological progress rested on a shift in cultural conceptions of human nature and on the spread of knowledge in Europe since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As interesting as the link between the intellectual and economic driving forces of the Enlightenment and industrialization may be, this thesis does little to answer the question of why, of all moments, a growth movement is intellectually on the rise again right now. Perhaps one answer is to reverse the question – why, despite the preconditions of a “culture of growth” that Mokyr described, was there over the past thirty years an ever-strengthening “culture of anti-growth” in the West?
Whoever looks for sources beyond economics might find them in a German sociologist: Ulrich Beck. With his diagnosis of the Risikogesellschaft, the risk society, he had once become famous after the Chernobyl accident. The catastrophe at the “systemic adversary” in the East already had quite direct effects in the West, because it invited reflection, as in a mirror, on the West’s own systemic risks. That the Soviet “enemy” had a greater influence on the West’s self-understanding during the Cold War than one cared to admit, Beck made clear in 1992 in a remarkable essay on the “enemy-less state.” The “internal presence of an external authority,” namely the Soviet Union, had stabilized the Western states during the Cold War. With the disappearance of the external enemy, a crisis of legitimacy now loomed – such was his far-sighted diagnosis in the early 1990s.
The fear of Russian intermediate-range missiles, according to Beck’s daring thesis, was the West’s secret glue during the Cold War. Only in this way could a stable social identity settle into place, one that made higher military spending possible and legitimized the democratic system. The West as a political program staged itself (rightly) as the political antithesis of Soviet communism. Yet beyond the political implications that allowed a continuing liberalization, this had above all economic effects. In a double sense, the Soviet Union in these years was the best friend of the market economy. First, because the logic of systemic competition derived the necessity of economic growth from itself – to buy weapons and expand the welfare state. Second, because the later inability of Soviet communism to hold its own against the West economically discredited communism and so made capitalism appear, for a time, to be without alternative.
Tracing a culture of growth, one quickly lands at an “anti-culture of growth” that feeds on an external enmity. Or, put differently, the “culture of growth” Mokyr described perhaps channels itself only through the presence of an external authority. Precisely in the first years of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union itself was still growing strongly, the culture of growth in the West justified itself on foreign-policy grounds. One wanted to prove that one reached the moon faster, built better products, and let the population share more fully in economic growth. Ralf Dahrendorf once described the combination of economic growth and welfare expansion as the mark of the “social-democratic century,” but in a way it was precisely this that made up the “anti-culture of growth” the Soviet Union set before the West throughout the Cold War, until it finally lost the contest. The victory of Western growth was at the same time the starting point of the critique of the growth model – political elites now lacked the geopolitical necessity to maintain a culture of growth.
If the Soviets, then, created the postwar West as we know it today, as Ulrich Beck put it somewhat polemically in 1992, which West will the Chinese ascent create today? The Chinese export-Prometheus has already found a first victim: the belated end of the social-democratic century. With the economic rise of the Chinese, both the economic foundation of the welfare state and its ideological justification are passé. Where one had still competed with the Soviet Union, at least in the abstract, over conceptions of social justice, and finally prevailed, those welfare-state contests are secondary in the “Asian century,” if not obsolete. As late as 2020, Xi Jinping warned in a speech that China’s new economic success must not lead to any welfare expansion that would make people “lazy.” This too is a culture of growth, lived out from the very top.
The Chinese culture of growth that arises from China’s ascent contains the two core elements that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in their book, raise to a formula for success: state capacity and growth. Of the conceptions of social justice the Chinese state performs, only the same postcolonial performativity of the Soviets has remained on the outside, while on the inside it has been stripped of its welfare-state component. And of Marx, only the interest in technological progress that enables the transition from the bourgeois state to communist society. Or, in this case, from a peripheral state to a great power in the world system.
The suppression of trade unions, low wages, and hard industrial labor was already the order of the day in the Soviet Union, yet in China, unlike in the Soviet Union, it no longer marks a break with the state’s self-understanding. Where a culture of authoritarian growth is preached, one need not fear resistance from the left à la Solidarność – as long as the state grows. Somewhat straussian, then, one might put it this way: China’s intellectuals have understood that on welfare-state terrain they can only lose against the West, as the Soviets did – and so confine themselves, at home and abroad, to pure growth rhetoric plus practice. A domain where, through the scientific gaze of the Chinese, the West appears beatable, as Dan Wang’s Breakneck recently suggested.
With the success of that strategy, one arrives at the same time at an answer to the question of why a new culture of growth is thriving in the West again: it is a new “anti-culture of growth,” mirrored in China’s ascent, only under slightly different auspices. Even the political left is thus back on the path of growth, even if its Mazzucato-like reading of China’s rise rests on a very selective understanding of Chinese industrial policy. That Chinese industrial policy works precisely and only through low wages, non-existent trade unions, lax environmental protection, and long working hours is not stated openly here. The fate of the 200 million gig workers whom the Chinese writer Hu Anyan recently described so strikingly is inextricably tied to the Chinese model of success.
One could bring this sketched-out Chinese model down to the formula Hobbes plus Schumpeter: state dirigisme plus creative destruction, or industrial policy plus deregulation. Writing about the future remains speculative, but the West that China’s rise might create would likely reorient itself along exactly these two axes: the recovery of state capacity and the rediscovery of growth. The Soviet Union was a “gift from God” for the West, Ulrich Beck once put it polemically – whether China will, in retrospect, be a gift for the West depends closely on whether it can be beaten on its own terrain at all. Of the liberal rediscovery of the state and the left’s openness to deregulation: the political implications of the Chinese century in the West are only beginning, tentatively, to show. To channel the potential of a new “anti-culture of growth,” that could be the liberal-democratic task of this decade.
