Capitalism’s Crises. Alfredo Saad-Filho
has been reduced to certain basic freedoms: the rule of law, separations of power and basic procedural performance, such as electing representatives by means of periodic elections. Money has also come to play a crucial role in determining representation and the ‘people’s representatives’.
At the same time, US foreign policy, both during and after the cold war, has trumpeted the virtues of the US liberal model as the standard of democracy for all to follow. This model has become a major export of the US superpower. With the demise of the Soviet Union, a wave of democratisation, including in Latin America, Africa, Asia and former Soviet Bloc countries, entrenched the US liberal model of democracy as the global standard (Robinson 1996). However, the nature of democracy coming to the fore in the US and other parts of the world is prompting serious questions about the character and content of the US democracy standard. Since President Reagan, US democracy has been firmly locked into a path of neoliberalisation, which has conjoined capitalism and democracy as market democracy. This has increased the power of corporations in the political system by allowing greater funding to political parties’ (effectively buying lobbying influence), and has reduced electoral politics to a media-driven marketing spectacle requiring large sums of money.11
In the meantime, since 9/11, national security concerns have trumped domestic democratic rights and freedoms. The sweeping powers claimed to fight terrorism domestically amounted to secret detentions, suspected American citizens being designated as ‘enemy combatants’ without any rights, the use of torture in anti-terror police work, scrutinising adherents to the Muslim faith, and the use of assassinations to deal with terrorists (Falk 2004). In this endless War on Terror, privacy has also been a casualty and has been undermined, domestically and internationally. This has been brought to the fore by WikiLeak’s revelations, as well as by whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden (see Harding 2014; Leigh and Harding 2011). Moreover, the War on Terror has violated various international laws and standards, and has purely been driven by the logic that might is right. The illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, holding prisoners at Abu Ghraib without due process, the interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency on suspected terrorists, and the use of special killing squads and drone attacks have all raised questions about the nature of US democracy – and how it provides licence for wanton violence, gross abuses of power and violations of international law.
Basically, US democracy is securitised through two tendencies. First, it is narrowed by national-security imperatives, in which freedoms and rights do not matter if you are an enemy or suspected enemy in the endless War on Terror. National security trumps all due process and rights, for both American and non-American citizens. In other words, democracy has become militarised. Second, democracy has become securitised in the economic sense of ensuring that capital, particularly finance capital, prevails over democratic imperatives. Put differently, history has come full circle and so-called free markets are given more power through market democracy – a situation that is similar to the advent of industrial capitalism in Britain, when democracy did not exist. The economic securitisation of democracy ensures that market imperatives come to the fore to secure stability, technocratic forms of governance are strengthened, the power of the media is used to shape public opinion in the interests of markets, and dissent is disciplined through both market and coercive power.
In different parts of the world, the articulation between militarised and economic securitisation of democracy has been evident to different degrees, informed by national conditions and the degree of influence of the US. This democratic project, according to the US standard, has been happening through democratisation, regime change, new constitutionalism, for example in the European Union context,12 and through good-governance agendas – for example, in Africa. The securitisation of democracy, and its re-articulation as market democracy, has been about hollowing out democracy, reducing it to a formal electoral performance and presenting the undemocratic, hierarchical capitalist corporation as the custodian of democratic freedom. This has created a systemic crisis in which political systems are increasingly discredited and the gap between leaders and the led is widening, creating a legitimacy deficit. True democratic politics, driven by citizens, is being disabled and is in jeopardy. This systemic condition, in its intersection with the other dimensions of civilisational crisis, opens the way for new extreme right-wing nationalist, populist, religious-fundamentalist, authoritarian and even neo-Nazi forces to emerge, as disaffection and political alienation deepen on a global scale.
CATASTROPHISM OR TRANSFORMATIVE MOMENT?
So, where does this leave us? Is the world coming to an end? Is capitalism about to collapse? What are the challenges for left agency?
Without a deep understanding of the systemic tendencies underpinning the crises of capitalist civilisation, many view the civilisational crisis of capitalism as the beginning of the end. This perspective postulates that, if capitalism continues on the path that it is on, it will destroy itself, the human species and other life forms. Human agency is read out of this historical reality and this perspective easily descends into catastrophism with environmental, right-wing and left-wing variants (Lilley et al. 2012). This includes apocalyptic notions of ends and rebirths, millenarian prognoses, ecofascism and various theses on the imminent collapse of capitalist civilisation.
One danger in all this ideological froth is a rejection of humanity: we are condemned as a species and hence we need a post-human perspective of the world and the planet. This is a dangerous perspective in its abandonment of humanity and its resignation to the status quo. Moreover, it is extremely one-sided in its understanding of human beings by failing to recognise the importance of human activity in relation to necessity and contingency in history. Central to this is human agency and almost 10 000 years of human civilisational history, in which human agency and will shaped systemic dynamics, as much as these shaped human beings. This is the normative underpinning of an analysis of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation. This analysis is not neutral: it is about engendering transformative human agency.
At the same time, an analysis of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation cannot be uncoupled from the historical conjuncture in which it exists. But, rather than a conjuncture of catastrophism, we need to appreciate that global capitalism, in its stage of transnational techno-financial accumulation, is going through a conjunctural shift: from the conjuncture of neoliberal hegemony to a conjuncture of systemic crises and transformative resistance. Neoliberalism, as a class project and systemic solution, has not worked. As a class project, it is inherently crisis-prone and has systemically transformed global capitalism by embedding the power of finance capital in the logic of global accumulation, which, in turn, has created the tendency for financialised chaos. However, neoliberalism does not have the solutions to financialised chaos, which it needs to ensure financial returns, and neither can it solve what are historically unprecedented systemic crisis tendencies. Even if neoliberalism were abandoned, each of the systemic crisis tendencies identified would persist because these tendencies were not constituted by neoliberalism, except for financialised chaos, but have been exacerbated by it. Each of these tendencies – financialised chaos, climate crisis, oil peak, food-system crisis and securitisation of democracy – is now inherent to contemporary capitalism and part of its accumulation logic. At the same time, each of these systemic tendencies is autonomous and can overlap and interlock in different combinations or cut across each other. In short, we are in a conjuncture of deepening systemic crises and transformative resistance.
However, transformative human agency will not automatically come from an analysis of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation, nor from a reading of the contemporary conjuncture. At the same time, world history can go in any direction, unless the Left that is immersed in the current cycle of global resistance addresses three crucial and immediate strategic challenges, and grasps the opportunity to transform the current conjuncture.
The first challenge to left agency is to understand the dual political