Capitalism’s Crises. Alfredo Saad-Filho
of struggle in the contemporary world to come to terms with the character of the class struggle and left agency. In the twentieth century, three crucial class projects arose to challenge capitalism: Soviet socialism, revolutionary nationalism and social democracy (Amin 1995). Since the 1980s all three of these have been defeated by internal limits, the advance of transnational capital and the onslaught of the imperial neoliberal class project. The defeat of these class projects brought to an end an important cycle of global class struggle and shifted the balance of power to the side of capital. With over three and a half decades of neoliberalisation, a new countermovement of struggle has come to the fore to confront the social engineering of neoliberalism as a class project. This countermovement has entailed a cycle of global struggle against capitalism but it is very different from what has been before.
So, what is this cycle of struggle and what is different about it? The current cycle of resistance is marked by crucial anti-neoliberal struggles that began in Venezuela, with the Caracazo in 1989, a wave of mass protests against increases in the price of transportation and gasoline caused by neoliberalisation. Protests in and around Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, lasted for about a week, and hundreds of protestors were killed by the police and military. This was a defining moment for Hugo Chávez, the democratic socialist who rose to become president of Venezuela. The cycle continued with the rise of the Zapatistas and the opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the opposition to the World Trade Organization in 1999 in Seattle, and various other protests punctuating this cycle against organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank.
At the same time, this cycle of struggle is supported by four other crucial developments. First, transnational activism was strengthened with the formation of the World Social Forum in 2001. The forum has successfully brought together transnational and local civil-society forces that are resisting neoliberalism and attempting to develop post-neoliberal alternatives. It has evoked a democratic left imagination to make another world possible now.
Second, there has been a rise of the anti-neoliberal institutional left in Latin America. This was evident with the elections of Chávez in 1999, Lula in Brazil in 2002 and Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2006. These presidents gave momentum to a leftward shift in Latin America and the emergence of various centre-left and left governments across Latin America (for example, in Uruguay, Ecuador and Argentina). There are advances, contradictions and limits arising from this shift to the Left. Some commentators suggest that these political experiences and left projects are already exhausted, but nonetheless it is important to study and appreciate them as the first attempts at navigating or, in some cases, breaking away from neoliberal capitalism. Interestingly, many of the social movements that drove these institutional political shifts to the Left have not been displaced or disabled.
Third, the emergence of the so-called Arab Spring and the political revolutions in the Arab world have confronted authoritarian and neoliberal class forces. The politics of Egypt’s Tahir Square movement gave confidence to a new kind of direct democracy and street politics among unemployed people’s movements in Europe and various social forces in the US. For example, the events in Egypt in 2011 provided the international spark for the US Occupy movement and the more recent Hong Kong protests. The historical effect and the ferment of the Arab Spring is far from over, even in the Middle East.
Finally, the emergence of the Climate Justice Movement since 2004 has been crucial in the way it has influenced global awareness about the climate crisis. The movement has spawned key alternatives, such as the rights of nature, socially owned renewables and climate jobs, to the marketised solutions emerging in the UN climate negotiations. This movement is poised to grow as the climate crisis worsens, as indicated by the September 2014 New York climate march, in which over 400 000 people participated.
However, it is important to note that this cycle of global struggle and resistance is different from the twentieth-century cycle of struggle in four crucial respects. In the first instance, the working class is still present in the current cycle of global resistance but has been weakened dramatically in the context of neoliberal restructuring and the shift to globalised accumulation. In Europe the working class has been fighting defensive battles to retain the gains of social democracy. In the US the working class has not succeeded in confronting stagnating wages and deep income inequalities. Across the global South, workers have been squeezed by liberalisation and the push downwards in labour standards as a result of China’s low-wage manufacturing economy. Essentially, the Fordist social contract has ended, as greater precariatisation has taken root in labour markets across the world and the institutional power of unions has been weakened. However, the rebuilding of unionism, solidarity and the capacity for struggle among workers’ organisations is a major challenge in the current cycle of global resistance. This volume brings this imperative to the fore from various experiences of class and left struggle.
The second difference is that the class structures of most twentieth-century societies were conditioned by Fordist import substitution industrialisation and its attendant international trade relations. However, over the past few decades, neoliberal restructuring has changed the class structure of societies. Class as a social and ideological/political process is being remade from above and below. Traditional forms of monopoly capital are restructuring and deconcentrating in light of global competition, while new fractions of capital linked to financialisation and globalisation are being constituted. Hence, the class forces championing crisis-ridden neoliberalised capitalism and marketised solutions are becoming transnational. Their political positioning and alignments in the context of the crises of capitalism need to be clearly unpacked. Are their interests served by national capitalism or transnational capitalism? Left projects that have tried to win over national capital are showing serious limits in the context of transnationalising capitalism. This is demonstrated in the chapters on Brazil and India in this volume. Class is also being remade from below. Fractions of the working class are coming to the fore, some more precariously than others, and some outside the labour market as a permanent reserve army of labour of the unemployed and the landless. The youth character of the working class is also accentuated in particular national contexts. In some societies the process of ‘de-peasantisation’ is proceeding through violence and dispossession. This volume brings into view these various class-formation dynamics.
The third difference is that, in the twentieth century, vanguards proliferated: Soviet, social-democratic or revolutionary-nationalist vanguards. Class politics then was about aggregating interests of workers or peasants, or multi-class alliances within such political forms. At the same time, a political line and imagination was diffused from the centres of these ideological projects. In some instances, international movements transmitted mechanistic politics, while in others capital cities loomed large, such as Havana, Moscow and Beijing. In the end, vanguardism capitulated to neoliberalism and workers were betrayed. In contrast to this history of vanguards, today the political forms coming to the fore to champion alternatives to capitalism are diverse and include transnational think tanks, workers’ parties, anti-systemic movements, parties of the unemployed, unions and other political entities. No single political group has the monopoly on how the class struggle should be fought and how the Left should advance. This diversity of left agency has also thrown up a challenge for how political instruments are constituted to aggregate different types of social power. Hence we have entered the era of building democratic political forms, such as fronts, alliances, networks, mass party movements and mass movements – all with a transnational dimension and a diversity in their institutional and social forces. This is largely what characterises the new form of political instruments emerging to challenge state power and advance alternatives. This volume brings this phenomenon to the fore in a number of chapters.
Finally, twentieth-century resistance was bedevilled by model thinking, with a strong tendency to copy dominant models, such as centralised planning and the one-party state. In the current cycle of resistance, however, there is a more open way of approaching alternatives to capitalism. This is partly a function of the multifaceted nature of the crises of capitalism. Transnational movements that challenge neoliberalism, whether on food, climate, cyber freedom or the labour front, are all articulating alternatives. Some are more transformative than others, but it nonetheless affirms that the power for change lies with a plurality of left forces. Moreover, every society and context has its