Capitalism’s Crises. Alfredo Saad-Filho
(IMF), Europe is in a state of stagnation, with low inflation and weak credit threatening any attempts of recovery. Greece continues to be the epicentre of the crisis in Europe. Ukraine received a bailout to the sum of 17 billion euros but still requires further assistance. According to IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, the Eurozone crisis is far from over and Ukraine could destabilise the world economy (Wearden 2014). In this volume we look at the crisis in the Eurozone in terms of its underlying political-economic dynamics to understand what drives and what is reproducing the crisis. As for the US, modest economic recovery has begun, but the deep-seated inequalities that were foregrounded by the symbolic protest actions of the Occupy movement still haunt American society.
The big hope that economies in the global South would lead recovery in the global economy has also proven to be unfounded. Growth has slowed in the big global-South economies of China, India and Brazil, and in some cases this set in before the 2008 financial crisis. In this volume, the political economies of India and Brazil, and the limits of their versions of globalisation, are analysed. The economies of the global South face challenges from outward flows of finance and from the modest recovery in the US turning that country into a renewed destination for financial flows. In other words, countries in the global South are facing risks from fickle outward movements of finance, and there are strong predictions that financial contagion and turmoil could hit the global South (IMF 2014). Ironically, this is likely to happen despite the coordination and crisis-management role of leading global South economies through the G20.
As well as the long duration of the financial crisis and its widespread global impact, there are two crucial dimensions that accentuate its distinctiveness. First, the economic dimension of the crisis is underpinned by specific dynamics linked to the financialisation of the global economy. For example, the current economic crisis is not the same as the 1987 US stock-market crash as a result of junk bonds or the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000/01 because of overinflated values. This crisis, in contrast, has much deeper roots in the financialisation of the global economy. Transnational techno-financialised chaos, grounded in globalised and computer-linked financial markets, is now both endemic and a built-in structural feature of the global economy. Some refer to this as the global casino effect. These dynamics make the current crisis distinctive.
Second, the contemporary financialised crisis is also distinctive because it intersects with and engenders other dimensions of systemic crisis, including climate crisis, peak oil, food-system crisis and the securitisation of democracy. Contemporary capitalism is experiencing an existential crisis that is historically unprecedented. The total effect of today’s crisis of capitalism on civilisation reveals serious challenges and limits to the reproduction of capitalism, to the extent that a mere reform of the system – in other words, producing more of the same – will perpetuate a system that will destroy all human and non-human life forms. Capitalism may not collapse, but it certainly has become the enemy of planetary existence and it is incapable of resolving these incurable systemic contradictions without bringing about its end.
In terms of reforming capitalism, the second pitfall is that this imbues the capitalist class with ingenuity while at the same time reducing capitalism to a naturalised social system. This largely derives from a veneration of scientific progress, technological fixes and instrumental rationality. The allure of capitalist modernity looms large in this approach. A simplistic and deterministic Marxist view converges with such a perspective, and argues that capitalism is never on its last legs as long as there is room for further accumulation, profits and technological innovation – in other words, as long as the march of the forces of production can take place, then capitalism will survive. However, given the deep systemic and unprecedented character of the contemporary crises of capitalism, it is necessary to ask, can capital solve every crisis of capitalism so that it ensures the system survives? Whose interests are realised with these capital-led solutions?
It is revealing that the lessons that capitalism learnt from the Great Depression are still applied to fashion managerial strategies for the current crisis. According to the 40th-anniversary edition of Charles P Kindleberger’s book The World in Depression 1929–1939 ([1973] 2013), it is claimed that Lawrence Summers, a White House advisor, turned to the writing of Kindleberger and his peers for guidance in the dark hours of the 2008 crisis.2 For DeLong and Eichengreen (2013), who wrote the foreword to the 2013 edition of Kindleberger’s classic, the lessons from the book are informative: ‘Three lessons stand out, the first having to do with panic in financial markets, the second with the power of contagion, and the third with the importance of hegemony.’3
However, even with this advice and the hegemonic stability role prescribed for the US, the crisis has not abated. This has mainly to do with an intersection of the unprecedented dimensions of a crisis that is systemic, and not just economic. Even if capital ostensibly asserts solutions, which currently really means stabilising global capitalism, workers and the ‘precariat’ are squeezed and they pay the price in the end. This has become patently clear during the current crisis.
A third pitfall associated with the reform-of-capitalism perspective is its denial of class struggle to confront capitalism when it is in crisis and vulnerable. This is not just about fear of the unknown, a lack of political consciousness or the weaknesses of the vanguard. More importantly, it is about the failure to connect with and build in a democratic manner a mass-based transformative politics to champion alternatives. This failure is a reflection of the weaknesses of the reformist and vanguardist Left. At the same time, while the civilisational crises of capitalism deepen, mass consciousness veers towards catastrophism or denialism, and, ultimately, abstention from social transformation while capital merely reproduces the status quo of crisis-ridden neoliberal capitalism. With the unfolding of the 2008 crisis, capital has resorted to various strategies of crisis management to ensure it maintains the strategic initiative while rolling back counter-hegemonic agency.
In this regard, the role of passive revolution, a form of class rule that co-opts and incorporates the leadership of progressive social forces (state and non-state, working class and non-working class) is a crucial challenge for the Left (Gramsci [1971] 1998). This prompts the following questions: how do we break out of the trap of this interregnum, in which the old is dying but the new is not yet born? How do we shift the relations of force onto the side of the working class, the poor and landless to advance transformative politics? How should the Left strategically seize the opportunities of what is both an unprecedented but extremely dangerous systemic crisis? Or has the global passive revolution, albeit uneven, succeeded? This volume addresses these questions, rather than the question of how capitalism should be reformed.
CLASS STRUGGLE AND AGENCY OF THE LEFT
A cursory glance at the world today suggests that the Left is in a state of stasis. There is a deepening and intractable number of capitalist crises; the weaknesses of capital are visible; neoliberalism has failed; and there is an urgent need for alternatives. But where is the left agency to bring about transformative change? More importantly, where is the working class and the class struggle? A pessimistic answer to this question would suggest that the working class has been defeated and is exhausted. Ultimately, the Right has won – both the neoliberal and conservative–nationalist Right. This is a world order of only one paradigm, one solution, namely neoliberal capitalism, and there is no alternative. The workers, and the subaltern class more generally, exist in a post-revolutionary age and should succumb to the power of capital. For post-Marxists, this confirms a theoretical and philosophic postulate, namely that the revolutionary subject of history, the working class, is a spent force. Hence there is a need to find a new revolutionary subjectivity in the ‘multitude’ or in a post-class ‘hegemonic construct’.
In this volume, however, there is no obituary or fashionable farewell to the working class or the class struggle. Instead, the authors seek to look closely at the actual pattern