Capitalism’s Crises. Alfredo Saad-Filho

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 significance of an analysis of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation and its educative function in political discourse. On the one hand, this provides an antidote to catastrophism and grounds an understanding of the destructive logic of capitalism in a concrete analysis of the dynamics driving this logic. This brings into view the constitution of the systemic tendencies towards crisis and their class character. Put differently, these are not working-class, or more broadly, the people’s crises: they are crises of capitalism. This opens up the prospects for resolving these contradictions through left agency. On the other hand, such an analysis implicates the US superpower. It demonstrates how the US is contributing to the crises of capitalist civilisation and strengthening the process of capitalist destruction of life on earth. The US, in the current conjuncture of systemic crises and transformative resistance, is in crisis and incapable of rising to the challenge of resolving the systemic crises coming to the fore. In many ways, the contemporary domination the US imposes on the world, and its current role and place in history, go a long way towards explaining the crises of capitalist civilisation. Moreover, the US is also a major obstacle to resolving the crises of capitalist civilisation. In other words, a systemic analysis of the crisis of capitalism is both an antidote to catastrophism and anti-imperialist.

      Although such an analysis will not automatically shift consciousness, it does provide the basis to rethink the challenge of mass-based left politics. This is the second challenge to left agency. An analysis that foregrounds the systemic dimensions of capitalist crises also provides a map for locating left agency within a politics of counter-hegemony or transformative resistance. Although Gramsci ([1971] 1998) argued for a ‘war of position’ in civil society, this was not grounded in a concrete historical context that unpacked and theorised the nature of resistance in particular historical conjunctures. This means Gramsci’s abstractions have to be grounded in the global conjuncture of systemic crises and transformative resistance. Moreover, such a practice of transformative resistance challenges the Left to go beyond a politics of ‘reform versus revolution’ and to situate its agency within civil society, at the centre of the contradictions that will contribute to the end of capitalism. More practically, this means transformative resistance has to build a politics around the systemic crisis tendencies of capitalist civilisation, so these tendencies are confronted both defensively and offensively. In short, transformative resistance has to be against financialised neoliberalisation and for de-marketised and de-commodified alternatives that expand the commons. It has to be against false solutions to the climate crisis and for legally binding emission-reduction targets for all countries, for resolution of climate debt, rights-based carbon budgets, climate jobs and public transport; against extractivism of fossil fuels and for socially owned renewables and energy sovereignty; against the corporate-controlled industrial food system and for food sovereignty; and against market democracy and for the defence of all democratic rights, freedoms and forms of democracy – that is, more democracy, not less. The Left today has to be clear, consistent and firm on these questions to be able to build transformative mass-based movements and politics.

      The third challenge confronting the Left, which is derived from an analysis of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation and the transformative prospects it creates, is the strategic switch from the momentum of СКАЧАТЬ