The massiveness of Winkler’s construction thus appears as a compensation for the lack of an explanatory framework that might account for the historical issues it raises. As is often the case with books such as this, narrative range functions as a placeholder for conceptual rigour. Despite its impressive scale, The Age of Catastrophe is basically an ideological exercise, an empirically implausible morality tale. Intellectually, it is obvious that the ‘Second Thirty Years’ War’ of 1914–45 will never be understood without a theory of the interlocking dynamics of capitalist development and imperialist geopolitics. Winkler’s long chapter on ‘National States and Empires’ in From the Beginnings is where one might expect to find some attempt to handle this problem. But it ends up as a diffuse narrative of well over 500 pages which manages to avoid accounting for the driving forces behind European expansion. The only analytic statement provided is that the ‘agonistic principle’, with its roots in the Homeric epoch, pushed various European states to strive for glory in the non-European world. This explanation is, of course, wholly inadequate. It was imperialist conflict that broke apart the Socialist International, detonated the Russian Revolution and established the fundamental context for the rise of Fascism. The Second World War was also quite obviously, as Michael Mann has recently put it, ‘the last inter-imperial war’.

Verhagen contrasts Tiravanija’s celebration of the contemporary artist’s travels with a reading of Walead Beshty’s FedEx Boxes (2007). The work is composed of laminated and mirrored glass cubes, which are shipped in FedEx boxes between exhibitions, where the boxes are transformed into their pedestals. On top of the boxes are waybills and custom notes, symbolizing the ‘elaborate machinery of modern border controls’. In these material forms, Beshty highlights not only the volume of handling and shipping that contemporary artworks undergo, but also the associated knocks and blows. The cracked surfaces of the glass cubes reveal the institutional processes of their exhibition—‘the more they travel, the more damaged they are.’ For Verhagen, the cracked glass evokes structures damaged in violent conflicts, and hence points to other travellers: peacekeepers and refugees. On an aesthetic level, Verhagen sees this work as breaking with traditional assumptions of artworks as timeless objects that require careful conservation. Though this assumption has obviously been under attack for almost a century now, alongside complex and ambiguous expressions of the ‘homelessness’ of art, Verhagen reads this piece as articulating the specific nature of travel today, showing increased movement in conditions of globalization to be heavily associated with ‘risk and degradation’.

In his 1996 essay, ‘A Theory of Tourism’, Enzensberger noted that tourism advanced in step with industrial capitalism, as an expanding urban bourgeoisie took advantage of new means of transport to escape from increasingly congested cities. But as tourists’ experiences are entirely shaped by the forces they wish to break away from, their radical taste for new freedoms is inevitably frustrated. Tourism is thus ‘always outrun by its refutation’. This dialectic is the driving force of tourism’s development, and it ‘redoubles its efforts after each defeat’. For Verhagen, Enzensberger’s point retains its relevance today, the rise of global trade and the development of budget travel going hand-in-hand since the 1960s, both shaping tourism into a ‘potent instance in the expansion in global trade and a catalyst for other forms of social exchange’, as well as a tangible mode for insertion into global circuits. Verhagen contrasts Almond’s work to the direct engagement with mass tourism in Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Visible World (1986–2001), an installation of 3,000 tourist photos displayed on light-boxes. More jarring is Turista (1994) by Francis Alÿs, an important artist for Verhagen. In this performance piece, documented in photographs, Alÿs stands beside the plumbers, carpenters and electricians offering their services on the Zócalo in Mexico City, his own sign reading ‘Turista’. As Verhagen comments, ‘In Alÿs’s action, the inappropriateness of his appearance among the job seekers illuminates his privilege and, by extension, the structural economic imbalances that underlie it.’

For Verhagen, these works show that to simply affirm—as the ‘first line of resistance’—those aspects of life that most immediately appear under threat by the temporal and geographical reach of the global market, while lacking any clear analysis of how they are coeval with and thus shaped by that market, is to risk both naturalizing and also moralizing them. It is also to ignore, as Verhagen notes, that many global developments are today parasitic on this ideal of the local, and are in fact powered by a ‘keen and superficial’ preoccupation with it; yet the personal (or private) remains political. Critical art practice will seek to unearth the contradictions inherent within globalization’s processes, rather than resting content with the valorization of its surface-level, highly individualized positive aspects; it will refuse any attempt at escape or utopianization.

[...] Much of the recent discussion has been limited to arguments for re-distribution after the fact, through taxes and social spending, thereby ‘naturalizing’ the sources of inequality in the primary distribution between capital and labour, ultimately leading to an impasse.

The prevailing orthodoxy accounts for the stagnation or decline of working-class incomes in Western economies by reference to productivity. The majority of workers are said to be less productive, either because competition from lower-income countries has reduced the value of the goods and services they produce, or because new technologies have made their labour redundant. Askenazy’s new book, Tous rentiers!, challenges such views. He argues that social-democratic parties, in reproducing the ‘productivity’ story, have surrendered to fatalism. By accepting primary distribution as ‘natural’, they are limited to proposing redistributive measures only—themselves problematic in the global economy—or abandoning the pursuit of equality altogether for the mirage of ‘equal opportunity’. Meanwhile the devaluation of work performed by the mass of people is pushing capitalism into a deflationary spiral. He links this dysfunctional primary distribution to the ability of powerful actors to capture ‘rents’—incomes deriving from certain socio-economic or political advantages, rather than their contribution to production. Those advantages can be challenged, and the primary distribution to which they give rise is therefore malleable. A second theme of the book is the ideology of private property, which is used to buttress existing rents by linking them to property rights. The notion of a ‘property-owning democracy’, sustained in particular by owner-occupation in housing, serves to defend the predatory claims of the strongest. [...]

Rather than accept the ‘naturalist’ interpretation of inequality, Askenazy maintains, it is necessary to understand the upheavals that have given rise to new rents and allowed their seizure. He notes the role played by three ‘especially powerful’ factors in recent decades: the collapse of Communism and incorporation of China into global market circuits; the weakening of trade unions and destructuring of the working class (salariat); and new sources of rent linked to technological change and urban agglomeration. In principle, the growing importance of intangibles and agglomeration factors in economic development ought to devalue the claims of capital, as the giant enterprises of the digital age hardly need physical capital anymore. Instead, capital benefits from regimes that extend and reinforce property rights, the two most important being real estate and ‘intellectual’ property. The development of highly productive economies in major cities gives rise to rents of agglomeration, frequently appropriated by the owners of real estate: London, where Askenazy thinks feudal forms of land ownership still persist, is a key example. The financial sector, by providing mortgage credit, is also able to capture part of these rents. (Of course, it would be possible to limit this trend through political action by rent control and the provision of public transport.) A key aim of official policy has been to extend the range of private-property forms. Askenazy draws particular attention to intellectual property—exemplified by the exploitation of pharmaceutical patents, which drive up healthcare costs—and the privatization of data harvested from the internet.

Historical trade unionism, although it still has strongholds in some sectors such as urban transport, ‘struggles to conquer new territory because it is too tied to the specific characteristics of the work-places where it is entrenched’. However, Askenazy does identify some promising developments: the alliance between nurses and patients against healthcare corporations in some states of the US, for example. Movements against low wages for cleaners or in fast-food outlets are also part of this ‘trade unionism of opinion’ that seeks to build alliances with user groups and the general public: where low-paid workers depend on subsidies, it is in the interest of taxpayers for wages to rise. He refers to two other successful struggles. In the first, hotel-room cleaners in central Paris exploited their criticité during the season of high fashion shows to boost their wages, improve working conditions and challenge their casualized status. The rents arising from the fashion houses could thus be partly captured by workers rejecting their ‘outsider’ status and demanding to be treated as ‘insiders’. In the second, the Teamsters won big concessions for the drivers of coaches ferrying the employees of big tech companies to work in Silicon Valley.