Capitalism’s Crises. Alfredo Saad-Filho
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Название: Capitalism’s Crises

Автор: Alfredo Saad-Filho

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Зарубежная деловая литература

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isbn: 9781868149247

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 and historical manifestation 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 СКАЧАТЬ