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Don’t Look Up, a Netflix feature film for our pandemic, Capitalocene times, begins with two astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, discovering a comet that’s heading directly to Earth. When it slams into our planet, life as we know it will come to an end. Which is what happened to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. They were masters of the planet (mammals were mostly small and nocturnal), when a ball of fire appeared in the sky and hit what many scientists believe is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico with a force that smashes all understanding.

The humans in Don’t Look Up actually know what a comet is, and also know where many of them come from (the Oort cloud that surrounds the solar system), and can even calculate the kind of destruction one the length of a city will cause. Best of all, these fictional humans, who are very much like us – celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson described Don’t Look Up as a documentary – have a good six months to act. The US government, under the leadership of a White House run by a Trump-like president played by Meryl Streep, decides for political reasons to follow the advice of the scientific community and nuke the comet. But shortly after the nukes are launched, they are shut down and fall lamely back to Earth. What happened? 

It’s soon revealed that a tech billionaire, played with exceptionally evil genius by Mark Rylance, has presented the president, a major recipient of his political donations, another plan for Earth. His company, called Bash (think Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, Facebook), will instead catch the comet and exploit its minerals, which, according to his estimates, are worth around $35 trillion.

And here we reach the film’s most important insight. After the plan is adopted by the obedient president, the tech billionaire sells the whole mad scheme to the public as one that will make everyone rich. Poverty on Earth? Over. Jobs for all. A tombstone for low wages. Expect no dream or whim to go unsatisfied when the comet’s worth is added to the world’s $100 trillion global economy. Utopia, here we come.

Don’t Look Up gets a lot of things wrong, a matter that does not concern this piece of writing, but it gets this one thing right: there is no major market innovation that hasn’t been sold as the solution to some obvious and nagging market failure. The internet, for example, was sold as the democratisation of information. Soon we would all be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Success was only a keyboard away.

Now, if we go back to the second long sequence of globalisation, which emerged in the 1980s as a result of several organisational and technological innovations that condensed in the 1970s – containerisation, floating currencies, the computerisation of finance, the internationalisation of the division of labour – we find its promoters promising an increasingly multicultural world economy, the end of nothing less than culture itself. This transition from culture to a culture-less global capitalism was expertly described by Bill Readings in his posthumously published 1997 book The University in Ruins. Institutions of higher learning and multinational corporations replaced the word “culture” with the word “excellence”, which had no meaning. Excellence could be applied to a single mother, a drag queen, a parking attendant, a professor, CEO, you name it; culture had too much baggage.

With the call for an end to culture came the celebration of diversity and, most important of all, the vision of a post-racial society. What you will not find even during the seemingly enlightened period of decolonisation that followed the collapse of the European world order in 1947 and began at the end of the first sequence of globalisation, which occurred between the recovery from the long depression of 1870s and the Second World War, is any serious talk about a utopia that has no races.

True, the first globalisation sequence involved the unprecedented movement of people and goods around an interconnected world. As John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in his most popular work The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919: “the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep… he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.” 

The second globalisation sequence promised that these expectations would not be confined to men like Keynes, well-to-do white men in major European cities. All people, no matter what colour or sex or location, would have access to the fruits of unregulated trade on a planetary scale. The images and sounds of this post-racial, and post-Keynesian promise, were vividly captured by a movement of charity pop songs that began with Band Aid and a Benetton ad campaign. Both were launched in 1984, with the latter making marketing history with its striking pictures of very black skin right next to very pale skin. Money had finally become more than the universal equivalent among a variety of products; it had also become like our hearts, which, when placed side by side, were indistinguishable, were just chambers and valves made of the same kind of muscle cells, were, in short, race-less.

With this new capitalism, the major nodes of the world market – Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Cape Town, Cairo, Paris, New York City – would become one. In this utopia, all races neglected by post-war prosperity would not receive that blank cheque Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about at the March on Washington in 1963. Everyone would, to use the words of Rakim, get paid in full.

It was during this period of promise that European and American popular music expressed the new postracial utopian mood with a form called world beat. There was, most notably, Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So (which featured Senegalese Youssou N’Dour), Talking Heads’ Naked in 1998 which featured West African musicians and rhythms, and, of course, Paul Simon’s 1986 Graceland, which featured black South African pop stars.

How can I ever forget the power of that promise? I saw it with my own eyes in 1987 at Rufaro Stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe. For $5, I got to watch white American Paul Simon perform Graceland from beginning to end with black South Africans. Simon sang with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, played with Stimela, and gave the stage to Hugh Masekela. Apartheid capitalism was clearly finished. We felt this as a wind, blowing, it seemed, from the paradise of progress, spread soothingly across the stadium as Masekela’s “Coal Train (Stimela)” – described a capitalism that made life miserable for colonial and postcolonial black Africans. 

But strangest of all, lots of white Zimbabweans attended Graceland Live. This was strange because Rufaro Stadium was not just for black Zimbabweans, but working-class and poor black Zimbabweans. It was the people’s stadium, where they watched football, where they watched Bob Marley perform “Zimbabwe” on the first day of black-majority rule, April 18, 1980. White people never came here for anything. It was not their place, and yet, there they were, listening to “Stimela”.

Of course, they came for the American rock star, but, still, they came to Rufaro Stadium, to the heart of Harare’s townships. This made the possibility of a united colours of Zimbabwe seem possible. Paul Simon’s African-infused music, the satellites that transmitted the event around the world, the long-distant call, the lasers in the jungle somewhere. There appeared to be a terminus to that long train of black suffering, the train that had come from Namibia and Malawi, from Zambia and Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland, carrying blacks souls damned to the “the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg”. This was “Stimela”.

And yet, the train is still running, as the killing of 34 miners by police at the 2012 Marikana Massacre made very clear nearly two decades after the end of apartheid. Also, and more to the point, income inequality in South Africa exploded between 1993 and 2017, according to a paper published in 2021 in the World Bank Economic Review. The united colours utopia turned out to be there only for a handful of blacks who enjoyed, without moving to Europe or North America, First World incomes and living standards. As for the rest, anything that remotely looked like post-racial prosperity was mercilessly exploded by the leading institutions of second-sequence globalisation, the IMF, the World Bank the US Treasury, which formed the Washington Consensus on development economics.

Indeed, Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang argues that economies in Third World countries (now called the Global South) did much better during the racist post-war order than during the period that seemed to be heading to a post-racial planet. People of colour around the world soon learned that the post-racial did not bring an end to what Marxists call “primitive accumulation”. The rawness of robber-baron capitalism had somehow survived the inspiring collaborations between Peter Gabriel and Youssou N’Dour, the melding of striking colours and sounds. And a baby only got a baboon heart with hard US currency. 

But how did we all fall for this marketing? I did. Indeed, anyone who is of my generation, Generation X, surely did because it resolved one of the serious challenges to capitalism between 1947 and 1970, the heyday of social democracy in Europe and the US. As Ève Chiapello and Luc Boltanski pointed out in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism, first published in French in 1999, capitalism was faced at the end of the 1960s with two powerful critiques from the left, one social, the other artistic.

The social front concerned the basics: wages, living standards, job security, health insurance, housing, and so on. The other demanded the dissolution of the cultural structure of capitalist society, which, even during the social-democratic period, placed the father at the centre of a family that, when functioning properly, kept the mother in the kitchen or with the kids. The former, though opposed to the ruling system, was in essence conservative; the latter was liberal, in the American sense, and as such aggressively challenged conformism. The artistic critique (black arts, gay lifestyles, hippie decommodification, rock’s experiments with Eastern philosophy, angry students and so on), which peaked in the late 1960s, could be traced all the way back to poetry of Baudelaire and had an elitist aspect that often placed it at odds with the conventions of class struggle. This critique was absorbed by capitalism during the 1970s. By the middle of the following decade, Apple’s “1984” ad showed that anti-conformity was in the belly of the beast. 

A clear decision was made in the 1980s. Trade unions would be smashed, but world beat supported. Deep cuts would be made to welfare, but a TV show devoted to women’s issues and hosted by Oprah Winfrey, a black woman raised on welfare, would be produced. Structural adjustment programmes would sink African countries into debt, but display a row of hearts that were race-less. And so it is. A comet is going to hit Earth. And once again our wings are caught by the wind that blows from a paradise we call progress. ◉