Capitalism’s Crises. Alfredo Saad-Filho
to situate the place of populism in left politics today. She engages critically with a form of left populism that strengthens mass transformative capacities from below to deepen democracy.
Part 3 of the volume looks at manifestations of the crisis in the global South and the Left’s responses to it, particularly in Brazil, India and South Africa.
Chapter 6, by Alfredo Saad-Filho, examines the context and implications of two shifts in Brazil: the political transition from a military regime (1964–1985) to democracy (1985 to the present), and the economic transition from import substitution industrialisation (1930–1980) to neoliberalism (1990 to the present). These transitions have shaped the contemporary Brazilian political economy and the policy choices available to recent federal administrations. The chapter also reviews how neoliberal economic policies were implemented under various democratic administrations. Saad-Filho looks at the role and implications of the ‘neoliberal policy tripod’, namely inflation targeting, large fiscal surpluses and the managed fluctuations of Brazil’s currency, the real. At the same time, important policy shifts were introduced during the second Lula administration through heterodox reforms expressing a neo-developmentalism and inaugurating what became known as the ‘Lula moment’. However, despite positive distributional effects, the ‘Lula moment’ has proven to be an inadequate response to a globalised Brazilian economy caught in the tides of the global crisis. Saad-Filho examines the economic and social policies underpinning the ‘Lula moment’, and the limitations of such policies in the context of the 2008 crisis, the mass street mobilisations in 2013 and the social polarisation exhibited in the 2014 elections. He concludes with a reflection on the challenges facing the Left in Brazil.
In Chapter 7, Sumangala Damodaran debunks the idea of India’s resilience since the onset of the 2008 crisis. She critically engages the ‘decoupling’ hypothesis, which suggests that India’s high growth rates, like China’s, had an economic capacity to withstand the global turbulence or even provide immunity to it. Moreover, it was generally argued that India and China are likely to be the engine rooms to pull the global economy out of the crisis. Situating her analysis in the historical specificity of this crisis, she shows that the immunity argument fails to appreciate the extent to which India’s neoliberal structural reforms since the early 1990s engendered a set of structural features that were implicated in the deceleration of the Indian economy long before the 2008 crisis. At the same time, the impacts of the crisis did not shift the neoliberal consensus but, instead, dominant class and social forces have maintained India’s externalised and financialised trajectory even under the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist government. Damodaran concludes with a reflection on alternatives for genuine decoupling of growth from the international economy both at the macro-level and through participatory and decentralised fiscal planning, as is the case in Kerala, India.
In Chapter 8, Niall Reddy foregrounds the crisis of labour in the context of a crisis-ridden neoliberalised South African economy. The position of workers in post-apartheid South Africa remains hotly contested. Powerful, militant unions and strict regulation are said to buttress a ‘labour aristocracy’, which is blamed for trapping large parts of the population in unemployment and underemployment by driving the price of labour above levels that its productivity justifies. This narrative makes the labour rebellion, which began after the Marikana massacre in 2012, stretching from the peripheries to the heartlands of the economy, very difficult to explain.
Reddy questions the narrative about high wages and the ‘labour aristocracy’ by tackling its core assumptions. He examines decomposed wage data from a cross-section of South Africa’s Labour Force Surveys. The structural roots of the low-wage system in South Africa, grounded in the minerals–energy-complex economy, suggest that a broad political struggle is needed by the working class, in addition to new and more militant forms of shop-floor organisation. Reddy highlights the strategic political defeat of labour, including increasing precariousness in the labour market, as necessary conditions for such a struggle. Realignments among workers in the mining industry, as well as the unravelling of the Tripartite Alliance (led by the African National Congress – ANC) as a result of the metalworkers’ union breakaway from the trade-union federation, Cosatu, seem to portend the direction things are likely to take for the working class.
Finally, in Chapter 9, Mark Heywood provides a reading of the South African constitution that challenges simplistic caricatures of the constitution as an obstacle to struggles for social justice. Premised on a recognition that social crises are deepening in South Africa, including through wanton state violence, Heywood places the constitution centre stage in how we should think about unifying struggles for social justice. With experience in the Treatment Action Campaign, both as an activist and leader, Heywood demonstrates how combining mass mobilisation with human-rights advocacy has been able to secure social justice. He challenges overlapping visions for social change prevalent among various social forces, such as the Economic Freedom Fighters and the newly formed social-movement-driven United Front of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa). He also highlights four significant constitutional-based strategies that can strengthen democracy and advance transformative politics from below. He emphasises the applicability of the constitution in terms of challenging private power, the importance of socio-economic rights for social justice, the role of South Africa’s Chapter 9 constitutional institutions in empowering citizenship, and the constitutional injunctions that commit the state to be responsive and practise ‘good governance’. In his argument, he clarifies the real meaning of the property clause in the constitution to help put an end to any confusion arising from the clause and the dogmatic railing against it.
NOTES
1 Anarchism also shares these weaknesses, as Lilley (2012) points out.
2 This claim is made on the back cover of the new release of Kindleberger’s (2013) classic book.
3 James DeLong and Barry Eichengreen are based at the University of California, Berkeley. Kindleberger’s notion of hegemonic stability has essentially been about a powerful capitalist state having power over others, and serving as a stabilising force by being the consumer and lender of last resort. Eichengreen, influenced by Kindleberger, has built on the idea of ‘hegemonic stability’.
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CHAPTER 1: FROM MARX TO THE SYSTEMIC CRISES OF CAPITALIST CIVILISATION